significantly by the first. And when they’d violently overloaded, they’d burst right through the shielding, turning the armored sheaths into shrapnel that had sliced through everything… and everyone… in the room.
Loose globules of crimson blood floated amid the clouds of smoke and twirling bits of metal like some surreal collage, and at the center of it were a collection of human bodies in torn, bloody and burned blue utility fatigues. She recognized Commander Prieta among them immediately, his dark eyes clouded and sightless. But one of them was still moving…
Pushing off from the partially-open door, Minishimi caught the drifting crewmember and pulled the spare respirator over her face, wincing as she saw the raw, weeping burns that covered half of it. The woman-Chief Grieger she remembered-stirred and coughed violently as the oxygen hit her lungs, thrashing with pain and confusion.
“Chief Grieger!” Minishimi shouted through her breath mask, trying to pin the woman’s arms. “It’s the Captain! Can you hear me?”
“Ma’am!” Grieger calmed down, ceasing her struggling and looking into Minishimi’s eyes. “What… what happened?”
“We had a catastrophic overload, Chief,” the Captain told her, yelling to make sure she understood. “Commander Prieta is dead. The ship is dead in space and we have rammers inbound-I’ve sent the crew to the lifepods, but if those ramships hit us, their fields will tear those lifepods apart. I need the plasma drive up and running to get them some room.”
Grieger was probably in shock, physically and emotionally, but she was also a 20-year veteran NCO. Without another word, she pushed off from Minishimi toward a panel set in the far wall on the other side of the ruined trunk line. The Captain waved her arms to steady herself as she floated back towards the control panels, grabbing the edge of the panel to stop as she watched Grieger yank open the panel and pull down a heavy manual switch.
The switch closed a circuit with a loud snap and the control panel’s displays that weren’t smashed flickered to life, along with the lighting still left intact. Grieger pushed away from the wall and went to the control panel, moving from one station to the next until she found one with working systems. Her fingers flew across the display, and she paused as she evaluated the results, then turned to the Captain.
“We’ve lost our antimatter fuel pods, ma’am… they all ejected automatically when the circuits blew. The reactor flushed, but I
“Get it done,” she told the engineering NCO. “Then get to the lifepods and get off this ship. I’ll be on the bridge-contact me there when the reactor is up.”
“What about you, ma’am?” Grieger asked, eyes frowning beneath her mask.
“Don’t worry about me, Chief,” Minishimi assured her. “I’ll be off this boat just as quick as I can program the Helm to take the ship out of the area. I definitely want to live to fight another day.”
Larry Gianeto looked up as the primary lighting flickered on in the hangar bay, followed quickly by the hum of the main ventilators. He turned to Commander Irvine, the
“Commander!” he called. “Belay the lifepods! Get your people into the shuttles!”
“Roger that!” Irvine nodded in understanding. Now that the power was back up, they could use the hangar’s launch locks, and the shuttles could keep them alive longer than the pods. They could also get farther away from the ship, making it less likely they would get caught in the drive fields of the…
Gianeto’s head snapped around to the access tubes, and he made an instant decision. “Commander Irvine,” he called and the tall, lanky officer looked back. “Get as many shuttles as you can launched, and prepare to bring life pods on board once you’re out. I’m heading to the bridge.”
Irvine said something, but Gianeto didn’t hear: he was already in the access tube and heading back the way he’d come.
Captain Minishimi was already on the bridge by the time Gianeto got there, leaning over the Helm station, frowning in concentration. She had, he noted, taken the time to move Francis Wiitten’s body, strapping it into the acceleration couch at the Communications station.
“I figured I’d find you here, ma’am,” he said as he moved up behind her.
“Mr. Gianeto,” the Captain said in a disapproving tone, glaring at him, “I recall giving you an order to abandon this ship.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a smile. “But when the power returned, I realized we had a chance to get the plasma drives online and move the ship away from the lifepods, give them some room so they have a better chance of surviving.” He shrugged. “I thought you might need some help programming the Helm.”
“I appreciate the thought,” she said, voice gentler… then she sagged and sighed. “Unfortunately, we aren’t going to be able to do that.”
“Ma’am?’ Gianeto asked, moving over to the station beside her.
“The feedback from that field intersection did more than burn out our trunk lines,” the Captain explained. “We had a burn-through just aft of the bridge.” Gianeto winced. If an Eysselink field collapsed catastrophically, as theirs had, it could cause point failures at various spots in the field, which would burn back into the ship like a laser-an antimatter-powered laser fired at point-blank range. “It fried the ship’s navigational computer.” She waved a hand at the Helm display. “We have no helm controls from the bridge or even the auxiliary bridge. We’ll have to rig up something in the engine room.”
“But Captain,” Gianeto said slowly, realization creeping into his voice, “without the navigational computers, we’d have to maneuver the ship manually…”
“I’m heading to the Engine room, Commander Gianeto,” she said firmly, catching his eye with her no- nonsense look. “You are to get to the lifepods immediately and abandon ship. That’s an order.”
“Ma’am,” he blurted, shaking his head, “let me do it. This war isn’t over… they’re going to need experienced captains.”
Minishimi smiled sadly, laying a hand fondly on his shoulder. “Larry, I’d be a captain without a ship to run. This is my ship, and it’s my duty to carry out.” She jerked her head toward the door. “Get out now, or I’ll choke you out and drag you to the pods myself.”
“Aye, ma’am.” He turned and headed for the door.
“Tell my husband I was thinking about him,” she said softly. He nodded in reply, not trusting himself to say anything. He took one last look at her, then he was out the door and gone.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Shannon Stark stepped off the boarding ramp of the combat lander, the weight of her and Marine-pattern combat armor feeling strangely constrictive across her chest, and moved to the side to allow the Special Operations troops behind her to scramble off. They reminded her of a coiled spring, unfolding into a defensive formation around the aerospacecraft, full of youth, energy and an ignorance of their own mortality.
The turbines of the lander whined plaintively as they were throttled down, the waning blasts of superheated air from their vectored thrust nozzles tugging fitfully at the high grass in the clearing that had once been a shopping mall off the interstate in upstate New York. It was late afternoon, but the sun was already low in the sky: the days were getting shorter as autumn progressed.
Here and there you could see the vestigial remains of the old buildings, where no one had bothered to tear them down, but most of the cleared ground was now landing zone for two dozen Colonial Guard heavy transports and staging areas for four times that many armored personnel carriers. Colonial Guard troops swarmed around the vehicles, pulling security and deploying the heavy weapons, while officers shouted orders… among them Ari Shamir and Roza Kovach.
“Are we really counting on a bunch of just-graduated CeeGee officer candidates and a few training officers and NCOs to face down 20,000 biomechs?” Tom Crossman asked Shannon quietly, stepping up behind her with his helmet tucked under his arm.
