March To The Stars

'Because your butt always puckers when we get boarded.' Amanda Beach, his first officer, shook her head in mock gravity. 'Relax. It's got all the codes for an Imperial customs ship. Really, it's because your conscience isn't pure. You need to spend some time on the planets, reacquiring your oneness with Gaia.'

Giovannuci glanced at her, then shook his own head and sighed.

'Your sense of humor is the reason you're out here, you know. Just keep it up.' He leaned forward, as if the viewscreen could tell him more if he only stared hard enough, and rubbed his cheek. 'And you're wrong. There's something very much not right here.'

'You want me to go down to the airlock?' Beach asked as the CO fell silent, watching the shuttle make its final approach. He continued to say nothing for several more seconds, but, finally, he nodded.

'Yes. And take Longo and Ucelli.'

'My,' she said, pursing her lips as she got to her feet, 'you are nervous. Isn't that sort of overkill?'

'Better over than under,' Giovannuci said. 'Go. Fast.'

* * *

Jin waited until all the telltales turned green, then opened the airlock door and swung forward through it cautiously. The three people waiting for him represented a fair percentage of the total crew for a tramp like this, and their presence in such numbers indicated just how uncomfortable they must be.

He'd have been just as nervous in their shoes. The profit which could be made from 'jacking' ships like this were enough to make them high-priority targets. Even a tramp as old and beat up as Emerald Dawn was worth nearly a billion credits. So anytime one was parked anywhere but at a fully secured port—which did not, by any stretch, describe Marduk—its crew was always on the lookout for pirates. And it wasn't impossible to imagine the entire port being captured, or even that one Temu Jin would be in on it. Stranger things had transpired in the borderlands.

Besides, now that he thought about it, that was actually a pretty fair description, in a slightly skewed way, of what was actually going to happen.

The threesome had obviously been chosen with some care. According to her collar tabs, the woman was senior, a merchant lieutenant, so probably she was Emerald Dawn's second-in-command. She looked a bit long in the tooth for that, and fairly beat up. Regen healed almost perfectly, but scars were inevitable—at least when a limb hadn't had to be completely regrown—and this one, for all her striking looks, had plenty. She'd been in more than one fight, and a couple of them must have been with knives.

The second most notable was the largest of the group, a hulking figure which outmassed even the redoubtable Gronningen. But something about him told Jin that he was one of those big, fast men people tended to underestimate on the theory that anyone that big had to be too slow to be dangerous. He would bear watching.

For that matter, so would the little guy. He was the calmest seeming of the lot as he leaned nonchalantly against a bulkhead, but the low-slung double pistols sort of said it all.

And all three of them wore light body armor.

Jin stepped forward carefully, keeping his hands in view at all times, and extended the pad.

'Pax, okay?' He tabbed the controls and gestured around. 'All I want is a thumbprint saying that the 'inspection' was complete, and that you have no complaints. I'll put in all sorts of stuff checked, basically half the stuff on your manifest. And we're all happy. I'm happy, you're happy, the IBI asshole is happy, and everybody can go back to business as usual.'

Beach took the pad and glanced at the document on its display. As the bullet-sweating geek had suggested, it showed a detailed inspection of an imaginary ship conforming to their class, with a list of cargo opened and checked. It was quite an artistic forgery, a masterpiece of the genre.

'Why, thank you,' she said, giving him a thin smile as she annotated and thumbprinted the pad. 'What's wrong? You look nervous.'

'Yeah? Well, Mr. Gun-Happy over there looks like he's remembering the last baby he ate, and I ain't even gonna comment on Mr. Troll,' Jin said with a nervous laugh.

'I don't eat babies,' the gunman whispered. 'They stick in your teeth.'

'Ha. Ha,' the IBI agent said.

'Done,' Beach said, and handed him the pad.

'Thanks,' Jin replied with a relieved sigh. His hand was unaccountably clumsy as he accepted the pad, and it slipped out of his fingers. He swore, grabbed for it, then followed it to the deck, and as he did, he noted with the cool, professional detachment available only to the truly frightened that the threesome had reacted to the little ruse as if such things happened to them every day.

The fabric of his suit hardened under the kinetic impact of the first round just as the shuttle doors exploded open behind him.

* * *

'Shit,' Giovannuci said, and hit the alarm button with a fist as he erupted from his seat. 'Jackers!'

They couldn't simply announce that they were Marines who were commandeering the vessel in the name of the Empire. First, no one would have believed them, and, second, they were all wanted for treason. Somehow, they were pretty sure that 'No, really. It was all a big mistake,' wouldn't fly. So the plan was to secure the 'welcome party' and try to keep casualties to a minimum in the assault.

The 'plan,' clearly, was a bust even before Gronningen did a flying leap out of the airlock. The undersized gun-boy was pumping rounds into Jin as the IBI agent rolled across the deck to spread the hits across the protective surface of his uniform. The big guy, on the other hand, had produced a cut-down flechette cannon—from where was a mystery—and was filling the airlock with flechettes, while the leader type had produced a heavy bead pistol and had Gronningen perfectly targeted.

'Don't fire until fired upon' obviously wasn't going to work under these circumstances.

Gronningen hit the deck sliding, and targeted the little gunner first, but the gunman had taken one look at the Marine battle armor and decided the odds were against the home team. The heavy bead round clove through the bulkhead, but the gunner was already gone. Gronningen's next round, however, flipped the heavy gunner over backwards in a spray of red.

The woman was fast. Before he could reacquire her, she'd hit the deck exit button and was out of there. The inner airlock door slammed shut behind her, and Gronningen levered himself to his feet as Macek slid by and hit the door button.

'Sealed,' Geno said. 'Oh, well.' He rolled out a slab of claylike substance and slapped it onto the hatch. 'Fire in the hole!'

* * *

'Who in Muir's Name are these guys?' Giovannuci demanded. A security team was on the way to the command deck, but he wanted to be forward. The last thing he'd seen was a wave of heavy Imperial armor coming out of the shuttle, and that was not good news.

'I don't know,' Beach replied over her communicator. 'What kind of jackers wear battle armor? Or even know how to use it, for that matter? But if they're Empies, why don't they have a warship? And if there is a warship, where in hell is it?'

'I don't know,' the CO replied, looking at his schematic. 'But whoever they are, they're already through the lock. And moving down Deck C. It looks like they know where the morgue is.'

'Do they want to capture us?' the second officer demanded. 'I'm falling back to the Morgue, but I've only got a limited group. So far, only eight and the two commandos at the Morgue door.'

'Well, I've got bodies, but you've got all the weapons,' Giovannuci snapped. 'Sidearms are useless against that armor.'

'I know,' Beach said. 'I'm into the Armory. Now, if we can just match bodies to bullets!'

'I'll send groups through the side passages,' Giovannuci said. 'For once, the way they butchered this thing when they converted her will work in our favor.'

'Oh, yeah? Well, next time, tell them to put the Pollution-bedamned Armory further away from the main hatch!'