Without warning, he began striding purposefully toward the entrance, leaving a limping Raj struggling to keep up.
“Did that ding on your head scramble your brain?” Vingh asked, catching up with him. “What if there are more of those biomech things inside?”
“Whadda you wanna do, Raj?” Johnny shot back, eyes fixed on the entrance to the control center. “Walk back to Cleveland?” He laughed sharply, regretting it as his head throbbed. “It’s all over today, man. If we don’t win here, if they don’t do their job up there… well, we’re all dead anyway.”
“That’s what I like about you, Johnny,” Vingh chuckled, falling in step with his friend. “You’re always so damned upbeat.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”
“Shit! Cut right, cut right!”
Jason pushed his carbine out one-handed against the chest harness that secured it and poured a long burst of fire into the oncoming squad of biomechs, his other hand jerking his maneuver control to the right. Vinnie, Jock and Tom followed on his heels, laying down suppressive fire as they turned sharply into the connecting corridor with a hiss of compressed gas.
Flechette loads and low-velocity slugs chased them into the passage, spanging off the metal bulkhead, one round cracking painfully against the hard armor plate covering Tom’s calf. Grunting through clenched teeth, Crossman spun around and triggered a barrage of rocket-assisted rounds back at the pursuing biomechs, tearing through the armor of the lead troopers and sending them spinning uncontrollably in the zero gravity. As Crossman rounded the corner, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a human officer behind the biomech troopers and held up long enough to try to put a bullet in the man. The shot slammed into the wall instead, and then he was out of sight.
“How far off course are we?” Vinnie panted breathlessly, coming up on McKay’s right shoulder.
“That’s the screwy thing,” Jason replied, shaking his head. “We’re not. This isn’t the route we had planned, but it still leads straight to the bridge.”
“Kinda makes you nervous, don’t it?”
Vinnie’s eyes scanned ahead of them as they jetted forward, but they were alone.
“Well, where the hell is everybody?” Lieutenant Shamir muttered, glancing back at Lance Corporal Kurita, the NCO for his fire team.
“You got me, sir,” the woman muttered distractedly, attention concentrated on the corridor that stretched ahead of them.
They had penetrated the hull nearly ten minutes ago, and after a brief but fierce confrontation with a biomech security team, they’d encountered only token resistance at a few intersections. They still seemed to be heading for the bridge, and had taken no casualties, but something nagged at him that this was just too easy.
“Hold up,” he ordered, braking himself with his maneuvering jets.
Shamir twisted his left wrist up to his visor, bringing up the controls for his helmet computer, and tapped out a command. Immediately, a digital map came up on his helmet’s heads-up display, showing him the layout of the Protectorate flagship that the intelligence types had wrung out of Podbyrin back on Pallas.
The ship was surprisingly large, considering it had begun life before the collapse as a vehicle for a manned Mars mission—but, according to Podbyrin, the
An indirect result of this was that there were many possible routes between parts of the ship. The original plan had been for Shamir’s team to take a route to the bridge which led them on a path beneath the central habitation drum, while McKay and company went above it, and the third team headed for the auxiliary control room to ensure the backup weapon system overrides were shut down. But Shamir’s route had been forcibly modified by contact with the enemy so that now, while still headed for the bridge, they were now being squeezed into a path that took them directly through the center corridor that traversed the hub of the rotating habitation module.
And that looked too much like a trap.
“Wazzup, boss?” Kurita asked him.
“I’m about to disobey a direct order,” Shamir muttered, activating his helmet radio.
They’d been specifically instructed to stay off the radio to avoid being zeroed in on by the Gomers, but the Marines had always put a high value on initiative. “Gunny, this is Shamir, come in.”
He waited for a long stretch of heartbeats, praying to a God he hadn’t believed in for years that Lambert and his team were still alive.
“Lambert here. Go ahead, LT.”
Shamir let out the breath he’d been holding.
“Gunny, have you run into any Gomers?”
“Aye, sir, but nothing organized—it’s like they’re busy someplace else. We have possession of the target.”
“Roger, Gunny,” Shamir acknowledged. “Hold until further notice. Out.”
“What are we going to do, sir?” Clarke, his autogunner wondered.
Shamir took one last, long look at his map before answering.
“We’re rats in a maze, Clarke,” Shamir mused. He smiled tightly. “Time to climb the wall.”
“Come into my parlor…” McKay murmured to himself, staring down the elongated corridor at the heavy blast door that was the entrance to the bridge.
It sat there plump and juicy, like a prize plum hanging in front of them, with no enemy in sight.
“They gotta be waiting for us in there,” Vinnie surmised with a sigh.
“What was your first clue?” Crossman cracked, chuckling mirthlessly. “So, we just gonna stroll on in and demand they surrender?”
Jason gave the question a second’s consideration. This was obviously a trap—but how obvious a trap? Did the Gomers expect them to just walk in, or was the snare more elaborate? Would the Russians use heavy weapons and risk decompressing their own ship? How desperate were they?
“Jock,” Jason finally said, his voice sounding tinny in the echo of his helmet intercom. “Do we have anything that’ll take out that door?”
“Aye, sir,” the big man said, swinging the tube of a missile launcher off his back. He took a moment to program the warhead for maximum penetration, the onboard computer automatically adjusting the configuration of the explosives.
“Vinnie,” Jason instructed, “the second that door’s down, put a spread of grenades through it. Tom, you and I go in once the smoke clears. I’ll take the left, you take the right, and
“Sounds like a plan,” Crossman said, his helmet hiding his sneer.
“Everyone get behind me,” Jock told them, centering himself on the blast door.
The big Australian let his assault gun hang off its articulated harness while he concentrated on aiming the missile launcher—and fervently hoped that the bulk of the gun and his body armor would combine to stop any fragments the explosion kicked back toward them. Vinnie positioned himself directly beneath his friend, bracing his
