The door into the next compartment opened as he ceased firing the lasers. Both arms seared from the heat, telling him the lasing chambers were severely overheated. His head came around for a better view as the doors opened. A squad of opSha were maneuvering a pair of heavy lasers into view.
He snatched one of the grenades from the mount on his waist. The data interface built into the palm of his hand programmed it instantly, and he flicked it backhanded toward the door. He jetted to the side as the first laser fired, slicing the air a full meter wide of him as the grenade smacked into the same laser’s metallic shield and stuck, just as he’d programmed it.
Rick hugged the chamber’s wall as the grenade detonated. A split second later, a secondary detonation went off. The already gore-choked room was flooded with a wave of torn and shattered alien bodies, blood, and metal fragments from the exploded laser. He immediately flew into the maelstrom.
Hunger gnawed at him, making the core of his being ache, and his head swim. He searched the dead and debris, finding a trio of laser carbines, as well as one of the powerpacks for the heavy laser. He grabbed the rifles, sliding the straps over one arm, then snatched the powerpack, removed the connections, and slapped it onto the power coupling on his thigh. Energy flowed, and he shuddered with pleasure. It was…intoxicating.
The powerpack wasn’t spent after his internal batteries reached 100%, so he left it there to act as a backup. On to the next room; his theoretical map suggested he was close to the opposite airlock.
The room where the heavy laser squad had been was completely ruined. Guts and shattered equipment were everywhere. The miniature K-bomb had wreaked extreme havoc. If anything was useful, he couldn’t see it. He flew to the next door and stopped short of opening it. He could see the lock wasn’t secured; all he had to do was push it open. His adversaries had had over 10 minutes to prepare for him. He hadn’t been subtle or quiet. This was likely the last room before the airlock. Good place for a last stand.
He removed two more grenades, programmed them, and pushed the weapons against the door. Clink! They stuck magnetically in place, and Rick pushed away. At the other end of the space, back by the charred remnants of the heavy laser, he stopped and grabbed the biggest portion of a body he could reach. He launched it across the room with a heave, anchoring himself with a laser mount strut.
The corpse—he thought it had been an opSha—slammed into the door, forcing it open. A wave of laser and ballistic weapons fire poured out. While Rick shielded himself inside the previous room, the slaughterhouse he’d wrought was further burned, sliced, and torn apart. When he was more or less certain the doors would have swung completely open, he remotely detonated the grenades.
The asteroid base shuddered from the twin blasts. Then, silence. He grunted and flew into the remnants of their last-ditch defenses. It was impossible to tell how many there had been, or even what races they were. Most appeared to be opSha, but he was relatively certain a few were elSha, and he saw one alien he’d never seen before. A sleek body with flexible skin between legs and hands, silky black and brown fur, and tiny black-on-black eyes. It vaguely reminded him of a terrestrial marsupial, the name escaped him. Whatever it was, it was dead, just like everything else in the space.
The strange alien had been just next to the lock, which stood open. Smoke billowed out of the airlock and into the asteroid, moving in that strange way smoke moved in zero gravity. It could be deadly for a living being, creating clouds of dead air or air contaminated with toxic fumes. Rick closed off his air inputs without conscious thought, ‘holding his breath.’ As he flew into the smoke, he knew subconsciously how long he had before he’d need to breathe—around 20 minutes—with the stored oxygen in his atmospheric processor.
His grenades had done a good job on the defenders as well as their ship. It looked like they’d been preparing to abandon the station in response to his brutal attack. The ship’s interior was aflame in multiple places. Pockets of fire moved along combustible materials like a living fungus, spitting chunks of flame, which would writhe and sometimes find a new source of fuel. Fire on a spaceship was deadly serious business, as he’d learned in damage control training with the Winged Hussars.
He reached the ship’s bridge. Extruding a data probe from his wrist, Rick plugged into the ship. There were fires in all the major compartments. Nobody was alive. He’d overdone it just a bit. “Dammit,” he cursed. The ship’s fusion powercore couldn’t shut down. The battery bank that was keeping its power electromagnetic buffers operating, containing the miniature star at its core, was going to explode at any minute. No containment meant runaway reaction, which was bad.
His connection to the computer found navigational data. The ship had been preparing to leave, then rendezvous with another location in orbit just 24,000 kilometers away. The derelict battleship. That must be the real base, Rick thought. Which means Sato has to be there. In the rear of the ship, the first battery, heated to
