The Veritian Derelict (Junkyard Dogs) (41 page)

***

Back in the amidships area of the wreck, Fahada peered around the hatch opening into the small compartment that her target had disappeared into. She felt of flash of anger as she immediately noticed the narrow opening in the hull that led to the outside of the ship. She pushed herself over towards the opening, looking for something to clip a tether onto. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Something was spinning lazily, floating near the opening. It was...a pulse pistol! Her adversary must have lost it while squeezing through the damaged area of the hull. She smiled inside her helmet. Her task, it seemed, had just become a great deal easier.

The
suit thrusters of the reconnaissance suit she was wearing could get her back to the wreck if she somehow managed to float free, but their endurance was not unlimited and she had used fully a third of the thruster capacity of the very compact unit getting onto the wreck in the first place. She reached out and clipped a tether onto a D ring on the outer hull and pushed her body up and out of the small compartment. As she looked aft, the first thing she saw was a main battery turret that looked to have sustained little or no damage in the long ago battle. In fact the turret was rotating slowly as she watched. She smiled. There was only one way for someone to get out of that turret. Fahada would be going in after them.

***

"
The enemy is still following you, Vixen, he just now came out of the same opening that you used a minute ago
," sent Amanda.

"
Thanks, Pointer. Keep me posted
," Carlisle sent back.

Carlisle retraced her route down into the capacitor chamber and
pulled the hatch door to the corridor partway open. She then positioned herself behind the open hatch door ready to attack whoever was after her.

"
Pointer, let me know what that enemy soldier is doing,
" said Carlisle over the wristcomp net.

"
Will do, Vixen
," came the reply.

***

UTFN
Auxiliary Ship
Greyhound
.

Meanwhile Murdock, Hawkins and the crew of the Greyhound had their hands full with their own problems. The ship had
absorbed the last pulse beam hit and the shields had held, but the power plant was still racing at one hundred and ten percent and the overloaded cooling systems were only just beginning to catch up. Fortunately, the makeshift upgrade that the engineering team had come up with for the mismatched powerplant and weapons/defensive systems had proven to be effective.

They had fired pulses
whenever they had the opportunity but the enemy destroyer's shields were too strong for them to do much damage, especially at the slow rate of fire they could sustain. While he and the rest of the crew continued to wait until their systems stabilized, Kresge had a sudden inspiration. He would continue with the previous plan to lead the enemy ship into the path of the charged weapons on the stern of the
Lexington
. If Carlisle could manage to hit the
Skorpios
with another of those big pulse beams, the
Greyhound
might be able to inflict some real damage while the shields of the enemy ship were temporarily weakened.

Especially if Kresge's scheme worked.

Chapter 59.

UTFN Reclamation Center, December 16, 2598.

Onboard utility sled
Rover I,
somewhere in the scrap cloud.

Clancy Davis-Moore had been assigned to Sergeant Kelly's gun team. The portable beam projectors required a team of four to be operated with maximum efficiency and there were only seven Federation Marines. While any of the team members could certainly have aimed and fired the weapon, Davis Moore, with years of big game hunting experience
using a comprehensive array of weapons, had demonstrated that his abilities regarding the aiming and firing of the weapon was superior to any of the Marines. Displaying typical Spacer practicality, the Marines had immediately adopted him and made him one of their gunners. The marine contingents with their assault cannons, had been deployed in opposite directions from the stationary
Istanbul
to provide support if they should be needed. Their duty was to use the cannons on smaller targets like troops in battle armor.

It didn't take long before they were put to work.
One of the enemy cargo ships had been converted to use as a troop transport. With the inventory from three modern warships at their disposal, the enemy had somewhere around fifty sets of battle armor. The Scrapyard defense team, meanwhile, had less than half that number and all but a fourth of the fighting suits were antiques that had been captured from the terrorist group that had attacked the Scrapyard and the Orbital Station a couple months earlier. The defenders had elected to use most of their armor, particularly the old sets, in purely defensive roles, meaning the operators were not encouraged to leave their respective ships unless the situation demanded it. Those equipped with the most modern battle, armor, the two Federation Marine contingents and one group of four Meridian Imperial Marines, were outside in the Scrapyard in an attempt to neutralize any enemy assault troops that threatened to attack and board any of the Federation ships.

The
Marines were to wait until the last minute to reveal their presence. Kresge and Ambassador Saladin were pretty sure that the enemy had remained unaware of the three lightweight pulse cannons that the defenders possessed. Kresge and the Federation Marines had mounted their two cannons on the two Scrapyard utility sleds,
Rovers I
and
II
. To avoid being hit by heavy weapons fire, the Marines had practiced working with the utility sleds, keeping something between them and the enemy, taking no more than two shots, and then, using the cover provided by a wreck or two or three, moving the utility sled to another spot before setting up to fire again. Kelly's group was ready to begin firing, they were just waiting for the best opportunity to do so.

Kelly
watched in growing alarm as armor-clad troops began exiting the enemy transport vessel. Kelly counted that somewhere around a dozen men had left the ship when he finally made the decision to open fire.

"
It's time," said Kelly, with some urgency. "Target the ones coming out of the door of the transport, Clancy. Maybe we can keep them bottled up inside for a while. Two shots and then we move!"

The cannon itself was small enough to
be handled by a team of three. Davis-Moore did the aiming and firing while the other two tended to the capacitors that powered the gun. The capacitor module for the gun was attached to the projector or "stinger" of the gun by a three meter long, flexible cable. This arrangement kept the projector portion of the emplacement light and maneuverable and, depending upon where the gun was deployed, also enabled the capacitor tenders to remain under whatever cover was available as they switched out depleted capacitors for fresh ones. Each gun was equipped with ten capacitor modules, with each module good for five pulses, before the spent module would need to be switched out for a fresh one. The capacitor change took less than ten seconds when performed by an experienced crew.

Davis-Moore
took aim at the open doorway of the transport vessel, waited for the next figure in battle armor to fill the doorway, and squeezed the firing stud. A pulse of charged plasma lashed out and caught the enemy in the chest section of his armor. The bolt passed completely through the front of the armor and out the back, instantly killing the man inside. The armor, spewing a fog of atmosphere and bodily fluids that vaporized instantly upon contact with the vacuum of space, slammed into the inside wall of the airlock. The dead man in the bulky armor was now blocking the airlock door, keeping more than half of the enemy troops temporarily bottled up inside the transport. Clancy immediately targeted one of the troops that had already made it to the outside. Again the bolt struck home, with much the same result. The rest of the exposed, armor-clad enemy soldiers began to frantically search out whatever cover they could find. The gun team leader, Kelly, who also acted as observer for his teammates while they fed and fired the gun, noticed that the forward main battery turret of the
Perseus
was beginning to turn.

Towards them!

"No more time," he said urgently, "They're targeting us! Move! Now!"

Perry Allen
, calmly and professionally working the controls on the
Rover
I
, put the hull of the wreck they been shielded by before they had popped up from behind it to attack the borders, back between themselves and the rotating turret before heading as quickly as he could manage towards the stern of the old wreck. Just as Allen put the hull of the wreck between them and the destroyer, he and the gun crew saw a splash of white and watched as a shudder went through the wreck they were shielded by. The pulse had penetrated the hull material of the old ship on one side but had not been powerful enough to go clear through.

Meanwhile the other team of Federation Marines and the Meridian team had take
n out another five of the battle armor equipped enemy who had managed to exit the transport. No one else had attempted to make it out of the transport since Davis-Moore had taken out the man in the airlock. This situation was about to change, however, as all three gun teams were in the process of moving and therefore would not be firing any shots for several minutes. An armor-clad enemy pulled his deceased companion back into the ship and waved a chunk of debris across the darkness of the open airlock door. When that didn't draw any fire, he signaled to his companions that it was safe to begin exiting the ship again.

Chapter
60.

UTFN Reclamation Center, December 16, 2598.

On board mining ship
Donegal.

As the
Perseus
began to swing around to make another pass at the parked
Istanbul
, the ship crossed the path of the
Donegal’s
10,000 gigajoule mining laser. Captain Seamus O’Connell watched as the destroyer came into a position that placed it broadside to his ship. As the smaller ship continued its forward progress, the front turret was struck by a pulse beam blast from the remaining cruiser turret being powered by the
Istanbul
. The destroyer's shields flared to a painful intensity. Captain O'Connell chose that moment to trigger the powerful mining laser of the
Donegal
, targeting the same area. A column of coruscating blue incandescence, brighter than the nearby star Naccobus, lit up the entire Scrapyard for the space of several long seconds. The ravening beam from the mining ship’s laser, designed to bore through solid rock, lashed out and struck the front turret of the destroyer. The reaction was nothing at all like a normal pulse beam strike, the mining laser didn’t impact the enemy ship and cause her shields to flare up. Instead, the steady wash of the huge laser quickly ran the shield up through the colors of the spectrum from deep purple to searing white before the shield failed and the beam simply
dissolved
the material in its inexorable path. Jets of debris and atmosphere geysered outward from both sides of the turret as the beam bored clean through the armor on either side of the emplacement. When O'Connell switched the laser off, the armor on the enemy warship’s front turret was penetrated through and through by a perfectly circular hole -- an opening about a meter in diameter with neat, precise borders -- that silenced the front battery.

The smaller ship immediately lost power and began to drift, out of control. Captain O’Connell and his entire crew shouted out in jubilation. One of the most effective of the opposition ships had just been neutralized
!

***

On board renegade destroyer
Perseus.

The gun crew of
in the rear turret of the
Perseus
realized that this was the opportunity they had been waiting for to retake their stolen ship. While the traitorous officers on the bridge were busy trying to figure out what had happened and how to restore some of the ship's functions, her crew staged a revolt. Within about five minutes, the traitors had been subdued or killed and the ship was back in hands that were friendly to Ambassador Saladin. A message went out from the bridge of the
Perseus
. "This is Kalil Mohammad Khan, acting Captain of the
Perseus
. We surrender! Cease fire! I repeat, the
Perseus
surrenders!"

***

On board mining ship
Donegal.

Seamus
O’Connell waited for the capacitors that powered the huge mining laser to recharge but immediately began to search for another target. He hoped that their little stunt hadn’t called too much attention to the threat posed by the mining ships, previously believed to be part of the scrap cloud. He was pretty sure that the ship could sustain a strike from any of the enemy’s beam weapons, as long as the impact was to the heavily shielded front of the ship. If they were to be attacked from any direction but full on frontal, however, they might be in trouble. On the other hand, much of the ship was made up of empty holds, intended to store metals and ores, so the enemy would have to know exactly where to aim to hit something vital.