The Final Battle

speed. He staggered up the ramp and into the shuttle. A crewman-the only one Michael could see in the cargo bay-waved him into a seat, his pistol trained on Michael’s chest, as it had been from the moment he had appeared at the foot of the ramp.

“I’ll have the gun,” the man said. Pistol in one hand, he reached forward to take Michael’s rifle. But, as he did, the pilot fed power to the thrusters for liftoff and the artgrav twitched, forcing the crew member off balance for an instant.

Michael had his opportunity, and he took it. Purely on instinct, he pushed himself out of his seat and whipped his rifle up, driving the butt into the crewman’s stomach with sickening force. The impact doubled the man over, and he half fell, half stumbled back. It gave Michael enough room to bring his rifle to bear, and he shot the man full in the chest, the noise of the gun shockingly loud even over the roar of the shuttle’s main engines.

Shock had frozen Polk into immobility. Before the crewman even reached the deck, Michael was bringing his rifle up. Polk saw death coming for him. He threw his body to one side as Michael fired. The burst plucked at Polk’s sleeve and smashed into the bulkhead, spalling metal and plastic into the air. Michael tried to get the gun to follow Polk around, but he was too slow.

Polk ducked under the rifle barrel and launched himself into a desperate leap that threw Michael onto his back, the rifle ripped out of his hands as he cannoned into the deck.

Now Polk was on top of Michael. One hand was around Michael’s throat; the other arced down in a glitter of quicksilver. Michael only had time to bring his left arm up to deflect the attack but not fast enough to stop the knife from slicing through his DocSec-issue coverall. In a searing blaze of pain that shocked Michael into a frantic, scrabbling fight to win the knife, it opened a gash across the corded muscle between neck and shoulder.

With an awful clarity, Michael knew that this was a fight he could never win. His adrenaline-fueled energy was fast running out, and Polk was attacking with a manic ferocity that was truly terrifying, his left hand battering punches into Michael’s face while the knife in his right slashed and cut and stabbed past Michael’s flailing hands, a desperate struggle that left both men drenched in Michael’s blood.

Michael rolled the dice for the last time.

Calling on the last of his reserves, he arched his back, a violent movement that brought his right leg up hard and gave him the space he needed to twist his upper body away from Polk’s fist. He lunged for the knife with both hands, forcing it down, the sudden move throwing Polk off and onto his back. Polk fought to regain the initiative, but Michael’s right fist was free now. A punch exploded upward into Polk’s jaw. The blow hit home with a sickening crunch of broken bone that drove Polk backward, screaming in agony.

Kicking to get clear of him, Michael broke free. He scrabbled across the deck to grab his rifle. He leveled the gun at Polk. “It’s over,” he shouted.

Polk wasn’t finished. His right arm whipped across his body. The knife was a blur that moved so fast that Michael had no time to react. It buried itself in Michael’s right shoulder. Overwhelmed by pain and shock, Michael staggered back across the cargo bay. He hit the bulkhead and collapsed into a seat, the gun still in his hand across his lap. He glanced in disbelief at the knife lodged in his shoulder.

Polk struggled back to his feet. Terrified, Michael watched the man come toward him across the deck, a bloody-jawed horror with death in his eyes. Polk scrabbled into a pocket and pulled out a pistol. “Yes, Michael,” he mumbled; scarlet froth dribbled from his mouth as he raised the gun, his hand shaking. “It is over, but it’s not-”

Michael needed to move the gun only a fraction. He fired. The shot hit Polk below the heart. Polk staggered backward. The second shot hit him in the center of his chest, and he slumped to the deck, arms out wide and legs twisted beneath his body. But his eyes stayed locked on Michael’s.

Michael stared back. “Where are your Pascanicians and their lasers now?” he mocked. “I know we had a deal, but I decided not to honor it. You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

“You’ll … never make it … Helfort,” Polk said, the effort it took to force the words out twisting his face into a grotesque mask. “The pilot will know … so you’re … dead too.”

“I’ll make it,” Michael said. He fired again and again into Polk’s body. “Unlike you, Chief Councillor Polk.”

Michael looked down on the bloodstained wreck of what once had been the most feared man in humanspace. It was done, and now all Michael wanted to do was lie down and sleep, but he knew he could not. Polk had been right. The pilot would have watched the fight on one of the cargo bay holocams; now Michael had to make sure not to let him finish what Polk had started.

Where he found the energy, Michael would never know, but he bullied an unwilling body to lean forward as he worked the straps off his shoulders, whimpering in agony when one caught on the haft of the knife that still stuck out of his shoulder. Free of the pack, he reached in and pulled out the packet of autojects. With a silent prayer that his badly abused body would cope, he injected a second shot into his arm.

The change was immediate. Stimulants and painkillers flooded his system. They scavenged the last reserves of energy from his abused body, and it jolted back to life. He sat there for a few seconds. He wondered what to do about the knife. A tentative attempt to ease it out of his shoulder gave him the answer: Do nothing. Despite the massive dose of chemicals he had just injected into his arm, the pain was all but unbearable. Working with one hand, he did the next best thing: He slathered his entire shoulder with woundfoam before packing a crude dressing around the knife.

Reenergized, he got to his feet to make sure Polk and the crewman were dead. They were. Michael looked around the cargo bay, dismayed to see a row of body bags laid out on the deck up forward. Now I know where the rest of the crew gotten to, he thought; he felt sick. He counted the bags and then did it again to be sure. He’d been lucky. Judging by the number of body bags, the shuttle had lifted off from McNair with only two crew members: the command pilot and the man Michael had killed just after he and Polk had boarded.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that the command pilot was tucked away safely behind the armored door to the flight deck. He’d need a thermic lance and an hour to get at him, whereas all the pilot had to do was-

Heart racing with sudden panic, Michael bolted to his feet and launched himself at the nearest emergency equipment stowage. He ripped the door open with his good hand and pulled out an emergency oxygen pack. He clipped it onto his belt, slipped the mask over his face, and switched on the gas.

And just in time, he realized when he checked the air pressure in the cargo bay. You are one slimy little shit, he thought when he saw the readout. The pilot had been depressurizing the compartment, but so slowly that Michael would never have noticed. Another few minutes and he would have been breathing air with too little oxygen to maintain consciousness. A few minutes after that he would have been dead.

He patched his neuronics through to the flight deck. “Nice try, shithead,” he said when the command pilot’s face appeared. “Now do us both a favor and turn this thing around and take me back.”

“Are they dead?” the pilot asked.

“Yes, they’re both dead. And so will you be if you don’t abort.”

The pilot shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said with a self-satisfied smirk. “You’re a spacer; you know perfectly well you can’t get to me up here, so sit back and enjoy the ride.”

That was not an option. Michael knew what the pilot would do: override the airlock controls to trap him in the cargo bay while he transferred to the courier ship via the flight deck’s emergency hatch, but not before he had ordered the shuttle AI to head dirtside under full power.

Which is not going to happen, Michael told himself.

He would have to force the shuttle to turn back. That meant some creative destruction, and he understood shuttles well enough to know what to do. Whether he and the pilot would survive the experiment was another matter, but he was out of options. There was no way he would allow himself to sit back and wait for the end. If he had to die, he would do so looking death right in the face.

Michael emptied his pack and refilled it with his supply of microgrenades. He made his way aft to the ladder that accessed the hydraulically powered locks that clamped the shuttle’s massive ramp closed. Pack around his neck, he climbed the ladder. It was an awkward, jerky process with a knife in his shoulder and a useless arm, but he made it finally. He locked his left leg around one rung to hold himself in position, removed the pack, and set to work.

Even one-handed, it was easy enough to arm the grenades and place them behind a junction box directly