Junkyard Dogs 1: The Scrapyard Incident (26 page)

Chapter 46

UTFN Reclamation Center,
somewhere in the wreckage, October 9, 2598.

Working from the
control console on the
Rover II
inside
the cargo hold of the derelict cruiser, Carlisle activated the booster and
directed it across the empty area that the defenders had chosen. The enemy
responded immediately, aligning the bow of his ship towards her decoy. The two
observers reacted similarly, using battle armor thrusters to head towards the
spot. Harris began to move the bow of the
Terrier
slightly up and to port, to roughly align the shot for Hawkins.

"Take your
shot when you get it," said Carlisle.

The enemy ship
fired his pulse cannon at the combination booster and its camouflage disguise a
few moments later. The powerful pulse bolt sliced through the metal of scrap
and booster, blasting a fan of material outward on the bolt vector and igniting
the booster's fuel load. The resulting explosion momentarily lit up the entire
area. Seconds later, Hawkins and Harris had a firing solution.

"Have you
got him, Hawk? Careful, he's starting to move!"

"Aye,
Lieutenant, I
be
shootin'...Now!"

The
Terrier
pulsed with the now-familiar
recoil and Harris worked the sled controls to compensate. The enemy had begun
to reposition his ship with thrusters as soon as he had destroyed the decoy
target. This meant that his ship had been pivoting to port and caused Hawkins
to be just a little off on his aim. Having never practiced hitting a moving
target, he had failed to adjust for the motion of the ship. As a result, the
projectile penetrated the port drive tube at a slight angle. It exited the ship
just forward of the drive tube without exploding, dealing a fair amount of
damage but far from a killing blow.

"Damn!"
Hawkins exclaimed. "Sorry Lieutenant, it were the damned motion, I should
have been adjustin' for it!"

"
It's
okay, Hawk, at least we hit him. Get another shell
loaded!" Hawkins immediately began the process of loading a new projectile
and waiting for the capacitor bank to recharge.

Just as the first
enemy ship had been tumbling after the initial impact, so was the second. As
the bow of the enemy came into rough alignment with the
Terrier,
the raiders fired their pulse cannon. Their aim was also
just a bit off and the shot missed, hitting one of the hulks next to the
defenders instead. A cone of debris erupted from the impact point, peppering
anything nearby with bits of hull material and other, larger, high velocity
splinters. Fortunately, the
Terrier
wasn't directly in line with the cone of deadly debris, but Harris felt several
sharp impacts on the armored suit, one of which was heavy enough to slam him
away from the control console. He was only saved from being thrown out of
contact with the
Rover I
completely
by virtue of the tether he had preached about so often. As he reeled himself
back to the sled, he saw several new holes in the makeshift canopy above his
head.

"Lieutenant?
You'll be okay?"

"Yeah, I
think so, I just got knocked out of the control seat," said Harris,
excitement and exertion making him more than a little breathless. "Battle
armor saved me. Can you see? I think we took out his drive, but not his power
plant."

"Aye,
Lieutenant, you're probably right. I dinna think there was time before we hit
him for the beam weapon t' be fully chargin'. That means he were able to finish
chargin' it after we be hittin' him. He'll still be able to shoot!"

Harris felt a
bolt of near panic as he saw the unmistakable winking of the blue jets of the
enemy ship's yaw thrusters. The ship was still tumbling but the pilot would
almost certainly be able to stabilize the motion and realign the bow well
enough to hit the
Terrier
.

"Do you see
that? He's still got thrusters, Hawk! Brace
yourself,
we might be taking a hit!"

Chapter 47

...The numbering system for the spokes of
the New Ceylon Orbital Station is easy to understand, once you learn a few
simple guidelines. The spokes are really identical, for all intents and
purposes, but the designers of the Orbital Station decided to designate spoke
number one as the spoke that is nearest to the station's administrative
offices. When facing "north" or towards the end of the station
equipped with the big airlock that you entered through, the spokes are numbered
in ascending order in a clockwise direction. This arrangement actually places
the administrative offices between spoke number one and spoke number eight.
More detail on station orientation can be found in the section of this
guidebook labeled: "Station Facilities: Finding your way around..."

Hartwell Wrist
Comp reference note highlighted for further review by Tamara Carlisle. Excerpt
is from an orientation video available for download and as a hardcopy pamphlet
prepared by the New Ceylon Orbital Station authorities for distribution to
tourists and other visitors to the station. No author is listed.

New Ceylon Orbital
Station,
spoke five stairwell area, October 9, 2598.

The team assigned
to take out the guard station on stairwell five was designated as Scrap Four.
It was a team of four, headed by Haines' security colleague George Fowler. As
one of the stations farthest away from the Governor's suite, theirs was one of
several stations where the invaders had not been equipping the single guard
with battle armor. The team's objective was straightforward and should have
been relatively easy. All they had to do was
sneak
up
on the lone, unarmored guard and subdue him or kill him, either would suffice.
They had already captured the unarmed guard on stairwell four without incident.

Fowler had gotten
into an argument with one of his team members on the way over to their second
objective over who was going to go up the stairs with him. As leader of the
group, Fowler had declared that he would lead and that fellow security guard
Nathan Starkweather would be his companion just as he had been on stairwell
four. Gerald Rigby, a big, brash but minor player among the smugglers wanted
that honor for himself. Rigby had been openly antagonistic towards the security
officers during the entire mission and was angry and still pouting as the group
began to stage their attack.

Fowler and
Starkweather eased up the stairs on hands and knees. They had gotten up to the
bottom of the last flight of stairs, the one that culminated at the deck one
landing, when Fowler heard a loud thunk from the bottom of the stairs.
Damn it!
He thought,
someone had dropped their
emergency
breathing apparatus, probably that fool
Rigby!
Fowler immediately
dropped down and made
himself
as small as possible.
Starkweather, his companion, was not nearly as quick.

"Who goes
there?"

Something was
wrong. This was not the voice of a half-asleep guard! Starkweather had frozen
in a half crouch and was easily visible. The guard, Ezekiel Christchurch, a
little shaky from the stimulant he'd taken, placed the sighting laser of his
pulse rifle directly in the middle of Starkweather's chest. The red laser dot
wavered around wildly but if the guard fired the weapon, the results were
likely to be fatal.

"Put your
hands in the air and come on up here, real slow."

Starkweather
began to slowly comply. Fowler's mind raced over his options. He was about
three times the effective range of his stun rod away from the raider. From that
distance, the stun bolt wouldn't incapacitate the target, but it sure as hell
would sting. The man also looked like he was impaired in some way. Drugged or
something. Maybe they could still make this plan work. Amazingly it was Rigby
who saved the situation. He came out into the open and shouted at the guard.

"Hey, Stupid!
Down here!"

Christchurch, not
really thinking clearly, took his aim off from Starkweather and attempted to
sight on Rigby, four flights of stairs down.

"Nate, get
down, now!" ordered Fowler.

Starkweather
dropped and rolled. The guard belatedly swung his weapon back and fired a
pulse, but the bolt streaked through the space where Starkweather had been,
blasting out a chunk of the handrail. Fowler aimed his stun rod as best he
could and hit the firing stud. The bolt, although weakened and dispersed by the
greater than optimal distance of the shot, caught the guard in the midsection.
Christchurch stiffened and quivered for a couple of seconds before
involuntarily released his pulse rifle. The two resistance fighters looked at
one another for a split second before charging up the stairs towards the guard.

Christchurch, in
considerable pain from the stun bolt, groggy from the lack of oxygen and stoned
from the stimulant he had taken, did the only thing he could think of. He ran,
heading down the corridor towards station six. As he did so, he unclipped a
small communication device from the belt on his coverall.

"Ezra, this
is Ezekiel, sound the alarm! My guard post is under attack! Alert the others,
the station personnel are on the move."

Fowler and
Starkweather raced up to the deck one landing. Fowler scooped up the abandoned
pulse rifle and dropped to one knee to steady his aim. Before he could center
the targeting laser on the fleeing guard, Christchurch tripped over his own
feet, fell heavily and lay still. His transmitter skittered a few meters down
the corridor in front of him. The stimulant had allowed him to function at a
hyperactive level for a short burst of activity, but the stress of the stun
bolt and the lack of oxygen finally caught up with him. By the time the two
resistance fighters got to him, Christchurch had died of shock. They retrieved
the transmitter, but the damage had already been done.

The enemy had
been alerted that something was afoot.

Chapter 48

UTFN Reclamation Center,
somewhere in the wreckage, October 9, 2598.

On the video feed
from the remaining booster, Carlisle could see the
Terrier
locked in a life or death struggle with the wounded
terrorist ship and would have liked nothing better than to join the fight
but...she had troubles of her own. The two armor-clad raiders were moving
steadily in her direction, one below and closer, the other above and somewhat
further away. As she watched them on the video feed, she began to mentally
prepare herself. Following the Lieutenant's advice, she concentrated on
redirecting her fear, using the same mental processes she had used the day
before. There hadn't been time to do much more than react to the events on the
bridge of the
Terrier
. This time she
could afford to be more deliberate. She felt the process working. The fear
simmering under the surface and threatening to contaminate her every thought
began to cool and congeal into something else...cold, hard anger! She then
began to feed off from the anger. So these miserable, arrogant bastards were
out here to kill her and the other two members of her team? What gave them the
right to come into this quiet, remote system and kill all these innocent
people, to disrupt the affairs of an entire planet, an entire quadrant, maybe
even threaten the Federation itself with a religious war? Come to think of it,
what right did these bigoted Veritian Brotherhood bastards have to live at all?

Any vestige of
the fear that had so dominated every thought and action in recent memory was
utterly gone. What remained was a cold, icy core of concentrated, focused
anger. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, her mind was absolutely clear.
She felt a deadly calm settle over her. Her already superb tactical instincts
clicked into a sort of Whitney Overdrive of their own. Suddenly, she knew
exactly what to do next. With sure, confident movements, she activated the
second booster, guided it out from behind the adjacent battlecruiser and, using
the video feed, aimed the booster and its makeshift ram directly at the closer
of the two armored figures. Keeping the figure centered in the field of view,
she ran up the thrust until the construct was moving directly at him at thirty
meters per second. The raider aimed his pulse rifle at what appeared to him to
be little more than a moving junk pile and began firing, but the bolts weren't
powerful enough to do any damage. He thought she was going to try and ram him.
She smiled without humor, a feral grin that would have peeled paint from a
bulkhead. Fine, let him think that...

When the
scrap-clad booster was two hundred meters from the raider, her hands danced
over the control console, activating the pitch and yaw thrusters, orchestrating
a maneuver that flipped the construct end to end. The raider stopped firing,
frozen for an instant as the true peril of his situation dawned on him, but
there was no time for any meaningful response. As she saw the enemy coming into
view on the display from the rear-facing camera, she skillfully played the
controls again, completing the flip turn and stabilizing the booster's movement
to center the figure in the rear field of view.

Her grin turned
into a triumphant sneer as she slammed the booster's main drive to full thrust.
With the booster maintaining the same vector, only now moving rear end first,
it continued on course towards the raider for a second or two as a
hundred-meter long, four- meter wide burst of impossibly intense blue flame
lanced from the business end of the powerful main engine. Slammed by the direct
blast of what was essentially a giant blowtorch, the enemy's pulse rifle
dissolved in a pop flare of yellowish flame. Miraculously, the old battle armor
held out against the intense heat and unimaginable force but the armor, with
the enemy inside, was blasted more than halfway across the central clearing
within a fraction of a second. Carlisle watched as the enemy cartwheeled into a
vicious impact with the wreckage of a cruiser. A mist of instantly frozen
atmosphere was released into vacuum as something in the armor lost integrity.
The man may not have had time to feel much pain, but he had certainly known
what hit him. Carlisle felt a perverse sense of satisfaction from the grim
thought. She flipped the booster over yet again, then slowed and stabilized it
before slewing it in a circle to sweep the area with the video feed.

She spotted the
second raider more or less where she had expected to find him. The figure on
the video was just then between the two battlecruiser hulks, still a little
above them but starting to move downward. His position near the two old
cruisers meant that the same trick was not likely to work twice; torching him
with the booster was out of the question. She smiled again. The raider would
probably know that his quarry had been using the control console of a utility
sled or something like it to guide the remote controlled boosters. The enemy
had also seen where her vehicle had disappeared from view after her dash down
the access corridor. There were only a few good places within a reasonable
distance to hide such a machine, the hold of a derelict battlecruiser being an
obvious one. She lined the booster up the best she could on the tumbling enemy
ship and again ran the powerful engine up to full thrust.

Having done all
she could for her friends, Carlisle went back to work on her own situation. She
looked around the hold of the old battlecruiser and mentally took stock of the
space. Except that the bottom was open to space due to the open bay doors, the
bay was quite similar in size and shape to the court that was used for the
graceful three dimensional ballet-like moves and combinations of weightless
gymnastics. She nodded her head in approval. She knew intimately just how to
maneuver her body around in a space with these dimensions.

The hold was
reinforced with two sets of exposed beams, T-shaped in cross section, each
positioned a third of the length of the bay out from the end walls. The beams
consisted of three sections -- three sides of a
rectangle,
open at the bottom -- that went up along one wall, across the top of the hold
and down the opposite wall. The beam sections were constructed from centimeter
thick bulkhead material with the base of the "T" attached to the wall
and the cross of the "T" -- which spanned about thirty
centimeters
 
--
 
protruding about meter out from the wall. If
she were behind one of these beams, even if the enemy saw her go behind it, her
movements would be concealed. Not only would the stout alloy beam provide
protection, she could mount an attack from anywhere along the three sections of
the beam, from either wall or from the top of the hold and an enemy would never
know where she might attack from.

The battle armor
of her adversary was well adapted for moving the bulky suit around for short
distances of open space as its occupant went from an attacking troop transport
onto an enemy warship or orbital construct. Once there, artificial gravity or
the gravetetic boots with which it was equipped would anchor the suit to the
deck while the occupant slogged it out with adversaries. The armor was not
designed for rapid, precise movements within a relatively small, confined
space, especially under weightless conditions. Unfortunately, the only
relatively weak point in the armor was the faceplate in the helmet. Even it was
pretty tough, especially since all she had was a hand-held pulse pistol.
Unless, of course, it were subjected to multiple pulse bolt impacts.

Carlisle grinned
again. Her anger still simmered, if anything it had become even more intense.
Let the bastard come; this hold, this situation, this was
her
element, her killing ground, she made the choices. This time,
she
would be the aggressor. She went to the
farthest corner of the hold and scanned the entire area, mentally marking all
of the reinforcement beams and other potential hiding spots and the distances
and angles between them with the eye of a trained gymnast and hand-to-hand
combatant. She flexed and stretched her athlete's muscles in the special suit,
limbering up for the elaborate movements she knew would soon be necessary. Then
she took the captured pulse pistol into her hand, set it to fire a five pulse
burst each time the firing stud was pressed, and switched off her suit lights.

She waited, with
calm and deadly purpose, in the dark.