Poor Man's Fight (52 page)

Tanner kicked again, sending her stumbling back. She lost her blade. It gave him enough time to get to his feet. His left eye finally opened again, only to leave him looking through a badly shattered helmet lens. Tanner popped the seals on the helmet to remove it. His jacket fell open.

He flung his helmet at Lauren as she recovered. Blood trailed from it as it flew through the air to strike against her shoulder. His cheek bled freely, cut by shards of his broken helmet lens. Lauren came on, swinging feet and fists alike with frightening speed.

Tanner blocked, dodged and gave ground. He couldn’t avoid every blow, nor did his open jacket absorb them all. He took a shot to the chest, one against his injured shoulder and another on his cheek. He thought he felt one of his ribs crack under a kick. Tanner
immediately understood who was the superior combatant. She was kicking his ass. It was like fighting Janeka, only worse. Lauren intended to kill him.

No
, he realized. He stayed on the defensive, keeping his guard up and doing all he could to stay alive.
It’s not worse than Janeka. She’s not as strong.

He looked for an opening.
Lauren came on, driving him further back, but finally he blocked and twisted her into a tangle. Tanner went for broke: his forehead came down hard on her nose.

Rocked back by the blow, with shapeless bursts of red and green exploding behind her tightly shut eyes,
Lauren swung one arm out wide to fend off her opponent. It wasn’t the first time her nose had been broken. She needed only a moment to recover.

Tanner didn’t give it to her. He pressed on, throwing punch after punch, driving her off-balance until finally he risked a slow, powerful roundhouse kick. His foot came right into her center, sending her practically flying back into the main control console in the center of the bridge.

The tall fixture shook as Lauren bounced against it. She took a right hook to the face and fell down onto her back. Her eyes opened just in time to see the wrecked console’s shattered, laser-blasted top half slide down on top of her. Lauren let out a sharp, sudden scream of pain as hundreds of pounds of metal and sparking, ruined circuitry pinned her arms to the deck.

Though n
early doubled over in pain, Tanner jerked back with wide, shocked eyes. Her howl of pain bit into his ears. Tanner’s gaze swept the bridge, looking for the pirate who was certain to shoot him dead as he stood there dumbly.

No such pirate threatened him. Every one of his opponents
lay broken or dead. He was the last man standing on the bridge of a pirate ship.

The thought helped him stand a little straighter.

***

“
Lauren? Lauren, talk to me, God dammit!” Casey stared at the holocom on his wrist, so angered by the blank screen of his comms channel that he wanted to put a bullet through it. No reply came. It didn’t bode well.

His mind raced. He had to do something. “Fuentes!” he barked over the main channel reserved for boarding teams. “Harrison, Bell! Get your asses up to
Vengeance
!”

Chang looked on with a frown. Unlike most of his comrades, he gave no outward sign of stress.
Though just as concerned as the rest of the pirates, he didn’t let it show. “That’s gonna leave us really thin here,” Chang warned quietly. “There can’t be that big a fight going on over there.”

“Do
you wanna take that fucking chance?” snapped the captain. Then he bit back his next comment, forcing himself to take a breath once confronted with Chang’s calm expression. “It can’t be any security teams or other bullshit from this ship, ‘cause our guys at the airlocks didn’t see anything get by them. It’s gotta be some faction of our own crew making a play.”

“Gonna be tough sorting out the friendlies from the traitors if that’s the case,” observed Chang.

Casey grunted. He looked out across the promenade deck, his gaze sweeping across the hundreds of passengers and crew and their comparative handful of captors. “We’ve got this ship,” he said. “We’ve got everyone under guard, we’ve got the bridge, the shuttle bay and engineering covered. We don’t need more than that until this mess is straightened out.”

***

“Wow. Those really are some thick doors,” huffed Tanner. He tapped at them with his reloaded plasma gun, impressed by how solid the metal sounded.

The only other conscious person on the bridge said nothing in response. She lay with her arms buried under the wrecked control console, biting back her pain. Her eyes darted this way and that, looking for any sort of opportunity but finding none. Even Jerry, though still out cold,
lay securely bound in electrostatic tape.

Tanner limped around in a circle at the center of the bridge
to assess the damage. The command and control table was smashed, and with it the usual three-dimensional sensor bubble was gone. Still, Tanner didn’t need to operate the destroyer by himself, even if he could. He just had to make sure nobody else took control of the bridge, and to hope engineering would remain too chaotic for anyone there to override his control.

“Those blast seals aren’t too thick to cut through with the right tools,”
Lauren said bitterly. “They’ll get on that as soon as they realize they’ve lost the bridge. Probably right now,” she added, hissing through her pain.

“Yeah. Figured that part out already.”
Tanner made his way to the communications station, which thankfully had suffered only minimal damage. The controls weren’t too different from the set-up on
St. Jude
; there was certainly more to work with, but some of the basic equipment was about the same.

“What’s… drones?” he blinked at the status board. “You’re using jammer drones?”

Lauren looked at him with disgust. “What kind of idiot are you, anyway?”

He shrugged. “Not gonna argue that, but at least you have idiot-proof controls,” he muttered as he deactivated the drones.
Tanner called up the broad-frequency distress channels and keyed the mic.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is—“ he stopped. There was a protocol for this. Mayday three times, ship identification three times, position, situation, passengers… only how should he identify himself?
St. Jude
was gone.
Pride of Polaris
was the one in trouble, yet he wasn’t actually on the
Pride
. And
Vengeance
was a pirate ship…Tanner frowned.
What the hell
, he decided.
Tell it to them straight. If I die, at least there’ll be the recording.
He keyed the mic again.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Crewman Tanner Malone of
ANS St. Jude
, mayday. My position coordinates ride this signal.
St. Jude
is destroyed. I say again,
St. Jude
is destroyed. I am on board the Centurion-class pirate destroyer
Vengeance
. I have taken the bridge. Pirates from
Vengeance
have boarded
NSS Pride of Polaris
at these coordinates. I say again, pirates have taken
NSS Pride of Polaris
with approximately twenty-five hundred passengers and crew on board. Mayday, mayday, mayday.” With that, he keyed the “repeat message” button.

“You’ll be dead before help gets here,” spat
Lauren.

“Probably, but at least I ruined your day,” shrugged Tanner. He pointed to a relatively unscathed bridge station against the opposite bulkhead. “That the damage control station?”

“What,” sneered Lauren, “you plan on running this ship all by yourself?”

“Take that as a yes,” he shrugged as he limped over. “Oh thank God, there’s a first aid kit here.”

“Fat lot of good it’ll do you.”

“Y’know,” said Tanner, “
I’ve had to hold my tongue for over a year while people were shitty to me. I’m not obligated to be polite to you.” He paused with the first aid kit only long enough to put some clotting gel in the freely bleeding gash under his left eye. There wasn’t time for more than that. He had to figure out the console layout in front of him.

“They’re gonna break you before they let you die, motherfucker!”
Lauren seethed. “You don’t even know what pain is yet. Hell’s gonna be a relief when they finally send you there.”

“Your friends don’t sound very nice,” scowled Tanner. His eyes
stayed on the controls. The locked panel above the main console looked like it held what he needed, but he had no idea what the security access code might be. “Bet they’re not very trustworthy, either.”

“What the fuck would you know about it?”

“Realistically? Not much,” Tanner grunted as he tried to pry the panel open with his multitool. The clasps held fast. “But I read a lot. Read everything I could find on what you guys did to
Aphrodite
. Qal’at Khalil. That stuff. Seems to me you probably wouldn’t want to turn your back on friends like yours for even a second.”

“Figured that out all by yourself?”

“Yeah, well,” shrugged Tanner, “I’m book-smart. Not very good with tools, though.”

Tanner
drew his laser pistol, turned his face away and shot the clasps on the locked panel. Sparks and smoke flew. He pulled the remaining debris off and waved away the fumes. He found exactly what he’d hoped for. Tanner looked from the panel back to the thick metal barrier sealing off the bridge.

“I figure if I was on a ship full of guys like that, I’d want some way to deal with a potential mutiny, y’know?”

***

“
Casey, this is way bad, man!”

“Carl, just get
hold of yourself,” Casey said to the projection of his deputy on the
Pride
’s bridge. He stood with several screens from his holocom floating in front of him, each one displaying the faces of different team leaders. Most were back aboard
Vengeance
. A couple other teams were still aboard the
Pride
. The last of Casey’s screens displayed the computer-generated text of Crewman Malone’s mayday call. “Can you jam it?”

“With what?!” snapped Carl. “This is a fucking luxury liner, you think they’ve got jamming equipment on this thing?”

“Okay, fine. Guys, here’s what we’re gonna do. Wilson, keep working on this ship. Sankersingh, cut through to the bridge and murder that little shit. Fuentes, Bell, you keep going and get in there to back Sankersingh up. Metcalf, you’re in charge of finishing the sweep on
Vengeance
. Make sure there isn’t another one of these assholes hiding somewhere. Carl, you still with me?”

“Yeah,” he said, “yeah, I’m here. Sensor bubble still doesn’t show any contacts, by the way.”

Casey nodded. “That’s good,” he reassured Carl. “Okay, Carl, here’s what you do. Route me into the
Pride’s
ship-to-ship comms system and put me through as a mayday response. Let’s see if we can’t talk his way into a bullet.” He looked up to Chang, then gestured out at the massed hostages a few meters beyond him. “Chang, pick out something tragic.”

He pulled the video capture capsule off of his holocom, set it to focus on his image, and then tossed it to the floor in front of him. He heard the beep of his holocom as the capsule synched up
, and a second beep as Carl put him through on the ship’s systems. The pirate captain waited for Chang to drag a frightened young girl over to him.

A response screen flickered to life just past the capture capsule
, ready to project the image of whoever answered his call. “Attention, Crewman Malone,” Casey said. “I say again, attention, Crewman Malone.”

***

Tanner immediately snapped his laser pistol up toward the image on the screen of the comms station. He recognized the gravel-voiced pirate from the Qal’at Khalil files. The man had a pistol in one hand. Tanner had a sinking feeling he knew exactly where this would go.

“Better answer that,” warned
Lauren.

Trying to think of
how to counter the inevitable, Tanner limped over to the comms station. There was a chance this guy would pull something new, but he doubted it. So far his M.O. had worked out just fine. Why wouldn’t he continue it? The last thing Tanner wanted was a hostage negotiation.

No. The
last
thing he wanted was for some innocent person to die right in front of him.

He pressed the button. “T
his is Crewman Malone,” he answered.

“Malone. I’m not gonna tell you my name. I will tell you that I’m the captain of the ship you’re on. We need to talk. But
first things first.” The pirate gestured to someone off-screen with one hand. Tanner heard a yelp and saw a young girl in a blue dress shoved toward the captain.

Tanner promptly shot out the comms station.

***