March To The Stars

'And I'm here already,' Pahner said as he strode up behind Roger. 'You need to get the hell off the ship, Your Highness. Sergeant Despreaux is already on the shuttle, and so are most of the wounded.'

'Somebody needs to take this bridge, Armand,' Roger said tightly. 'And we need it more or less intact. Who's the best close-quarters person we have?'

'You're not assaulting the bridge,' Pahner said. 'Lose you, and it's all for nothing.'

'Lose the ship, and it's all for nothing,' Roger replied.

'There'll be other ships,' Pahner said, putting his hand on the prince's shoulder.

'Yeah, but if this one leaves, they'll be Saint carriers!'

'Yes, but—'

'What's the mission, Captain?' Roger interrupted harshly, and Pahner hesitated for just a moment. But then he shook his head.

'To safeguard you, Your Highness,' he said.

'No,' Roger replied. 'The mission is to safeguard the Empire, Captain. Safeguarding me is only part of that. If just Temu Jin makes it back and saves my mother, fine. If you make it back and do the same, fine. If Julian makes it back and performs the mission, fine. She can make a new heir. If she wants to, she can use DNA from John and Alexandra's dad. The mission, Captain, is 'Save the Empire.' And to do that, we have to take this ship. And to take this ship, we have to use the personnel who can do that most effectively and who can physically get here in time to do it. And that makes taking this bridge Colonel Roger MacClintock's best possible role. Am I wrong?'

Armand Pahner looked at the man he'd spent eight endless months keeping alive on a nightmare planet for a long, silent moment. Then he shook his head again.

'No, you're not. Sir,' he said.

'Thought not,' Roger said, and pointed his plasma cannon at the hatch.

* * *

Giovannuci looked at the tactical officer and nodded as the first blast shook the bridge.

'On three,' he said, inserting his key into the console.

Lieutenant Cellini reached out slowly to insert his own key, but then he stopped. His hand dropped away from the board, and he shook his head.

'No. It's not worth it, Sir.' He turned to face Iovan, pivoting in place until the noncom's pistol was pointed squarely between his eyes. 'Two hundred crew left, Sergeant Major. Two hundred. You're going to kill them all for what? A corrupt leadership that preaches environmentalism and builds itself castles in the most beautiful parts of the wilderness? Kill me, and you kill yourself, and you kill the colonel. Think about what we're doing here!'

Giovannuci looked over at the sergeant major and tipped his chin up in a questioning gesture.

'Iovan?'

'Everybody dies someplace, Lieutenant,' the sergeant major said, and pulled the trigger. Cellini's head splashed away from the impact, and the sergeant major sighed. 'What a senseless waste of human life,' he said, as he wiped the key clear of brains and looked at the colonel. 'On three, you said, Sir?'

* * *

ChromSten was almost impervious to plasma fire, but 'almost' was a relative term. Even ChromSten transmitted energy to its underlying matrix, which meant, in the case of the command deck, to a high stress cero- plastic. And as the heat buildup from the repeated plasma discharges bled into it, that underlying matrix began to melt, and then burn... .

* * *

'Breach!' Roger shouted, as the center of the hatch buckled, and then cracked open. For just a moment, white light from the bridge illuminated the smoke and steam from the blazing matrix before it was sucked greedily away by the vacuum.

The approach corridor was just gone. The intense heat from the plasma discharges had melted the material of the surrounding bulkheads and decks, creating a large opening that revealed the bridge as a ChromSten cylinder, thirty meters across, and fifty high, attached to the armored engineering core.

Getting across the yawning, five-meter gulf between his present position and the breach was going to be Roger's first problem.

'No time like the present,' he muttered, and triggered his armor's jump gear with a considerably gentler touch than Julian had used.

He sailed across the chasm, one hand supporting the plasma cannon while the other stretched out for the hole, and slammed into the outer face of the cylinder. The outstretched arm slipped through the breach, but his reaching fingers found nothing to grip. His arm slithered backwards, and for just a moment he felt a stab of panic. But then his fingers hooked into the ragged edge of the hole and locked.

'Piece of cake,' he panted, and exoskeletal 'muscles' whined as he lifted himself up onto the slight lip which was all that remained of the outer door frame. He braced himself and ripped at the hole, widening it. The matrix of the ChromSten itself had begun to fail under the plasma fire, and the material sparked against his armored hand, returning to its original chrome and selenium atomic structure.

* * *

Giovannuci and Iovan stood with their hands behind their heads, with the rest of the command deck crew lined up at their stations behind them, as Roger entered the compartment behind his plasma cannon. All of them were in skin-suits against the soft vacuum that now filled most of the ship.

Roger looked around the bridge, then at the gore splattered over the self-destruct console, and shook his head.

'Was that strictly necessary?' he asked, as he walked over to the tactical officer's body and turned it over. 'Who?'

'Me,' Iovan said.

'Short range,' Roger said contemptuously. 'I guess you couldn't hit him from any farther away.'

'Take off that fucking armor and we'll see how far away I can shoot,' Iovan said, and spat on the floor.

Pahner clambered through the hole, widening it further in the process, and crossed to the prince.

'You should've waited for us to secure it, Your Highness,' he said over the command frequency.

'And give them a chance to destroy the controls?' Roger replied over the same circuit. 'No way. Besides,' he chuckled tightly, 'I figured they were probably down to bead guns after Julian's crazy stunt. If they hadn't been, they'd still be shooting at us in the passageway.'

He switched back to the external amplifier, cranked up to maximum in the near-vacuum that passed for 'air' on Emerald Dawn's bridge at that particular moment, and looked at Giovannuci and Iovan.

'I can't read 'merchant marine' rank tabs. Which of you is Giovannuci?'

'I am,' the colonel told him.

'Turn off the self-destruct,' Roger said.

'No.'

'Okay,' Roger said, with an unseen shrug inside his armor, and turned to Iovan. 'Who are you?'

'I don't have to tell you that,' Iovan said.

'Senior NCO,' Pahner said.

'Yeah, he's got that look,' Roger said. 'Not a bridge officer, so you can't turn it off, can you?'

'Nobody in here can,' Giovannuci said. 'Except me.'

Roger started to replied, then half-turned as Kosutic crawled into the bridge.

'I've got that second officer out here,' the sergeant major said over the command frequency. 'She's ready to turn off the self-destruct, just as soon as we clear all these guys off the Bridge. She said to watch the CO. He's a real true-believer.'

'So which one of you is Prince Roger?' Giovannuci asked.