Orion Among the Stars

“Anyone in there?”

“No, sir. Those are food lockers. We emptied them out to make extra message capsules.”

Frede giggled nervously. “We wanted to warn Loris that we were coming, so they wouldn’t fire on us, remember?”

It seemed like a million years ago.

“Looks like they didn’t need our warning,” I said as I turned the ship back into the battle.

I headed for one of the orbital stations, hoping to repeat my earlier tactic of gadflying one of the attacking ships to its destruction. But as we came closer to the fighting, swirling, exploding ships I saw that six Skorpis cruisers detached themselves from the battle to aim directly at us.

“Incoming message,” said Magro, the comm officer.

I tapped the comm key on my armrest board. A Skorpis commander appeared on the bridge’s main screen.

“ Apollo, I have orders to take your ship. You will surrender. You cannot escape us.”

At the velocity we were going now it would take more than an hour to build back up to superlight. The Skorpis ships could catch us and board us long before then.

“We will not surrender,” I said.

The commander bared her teeth. “My orders are to take you alive—if possible. If you will not surrender, you will die.”

Chapter 28

Six against one were impossible odds. Especially when the six were battle cruisers, twice the size and firepower of the Apollo.

I looked at the stricken faces of the bridge crew. They had been prisoners of the Skorpis once before.

“They’ll freeze us,” muttered Emon.

“And serve us for dinner,” said Jerron, trying to make a joke of it. No one laughed. They all looked grim, frightened.

“They’re not going to take us alive,” I told them.

“And that’s the good news,” Frede wisecracked. Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.

Our one chance was to make it down to the surface of Loris before the Skorpis ships could destroy us. I turned the Apollo in that direction, hoping that the orbiting battle stations could pick off some of the warships hounding us.

“Take power from the weapons batteries,” I told Jerron. “Put every bit of power we’ve got into the engines.”

Emon looked unhappy that his weapons were being drained. I started to say, “Keep the shields—”

The ship was rocked by several hits. Then a massive jolt slammed into us, knocking me against my seat harness painfully.

“Nuclear missile,” Dyer yelled out.

I looked at her screen. The engine section had been hit.

“Screens absorbed most of the energy,” Dyer reported, “but the hull’s buckled. Section eighteen, deck two is open to vacuum.”

“Seal it,” I snapped.

“Automatic,” she replied.

The ship shuddered again.

“They’re hitting that section,” Frede said, almost calmly. “They’re trying to knock out our engines.”

I jinked the ship back and forth, trying to keep their laser beams from overpowering the screen shielding the engine section. But the weapons of six battle cruisers all firing at us were impossible to evade entirely. Apollo bounced and shook like a rat in a terrier’s jaws.

One of the Skorpis cruisers blew up, victim of a Commonwealth station’s guns. But the others pressed their attack even harder. One of my display screens sputtered and went dark. The overhead lights flickered fitfully.

And the surface of Loris still seemed to be a million light-years away. We were diving toward that blue and white planet, hoping desperately that the Commonwealth defenders would allow us through their planetary screen and shoot the Skorpis warships off our back.

“Power drain exceeding safety limits,” Jerron said tensely. “The shield isn’t going to hold up more than another fifteen seconds.”

“More nuclear missiles on their way!”

I saw them in the main display screen and turned the ship to avoid them. But their guidance sensors had locked on to us.

“Hang on!”

Three explosions hit us almost simultaneously. Display screens burst in showers of sparks all across the bridge. The lights blew out. Acrid smoke filled the darkness.

The red emergency lights came on. In the dimness I saw that the bridge crew was still alive, though we would all have bad bruises from our safety harnesses.

“Power’s gone,” Jerron muttered.

“We’re dead meat.”

“Not yet, we aren’t,” I said, unbuckling my harness. “They said they wanted to take us alive.”

Frede smiled grimly. “Break out the rifles and sidearms,” she said. “We’ll make a fight of it.”

A wild thought spun into my mind. A memory of ancient days when sailing ships grappled and sent boarding parties to seize their opponents. The Skorpis were going to board us, I knew. What if we ambushed their boarding party and then seized their battle cruiser?

“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “We don’t have much time.”

As we were passing out the hand weapons to the entire crew we heard the thump and clang of a Skorpis ship mating its air lock to our main hatch. With our sensors down, I could not tell if it was a shuttle craft or one of the battle cruisers.

“If that’s a shuttle,” I said, “there can’t be more than twenty or thirty warriors on board.”

“More likely it’s a battle cruiser,” said Frede. “They wouldn’t risk a shuttle with all the shooting going on out there.”

“And they know they’ll need more than thirty warriors to take us down,” Emon added, trying to sound cocky.

“Good,” I said. “Then after we finish the boarding party we can take over their ship.”

Someone laughed in the darkness and muttered, “Yeah, the thirty-five of us against a couple hundred Skorpis.”

There was no time to worry about the odds. The Skorpis would quickly burn through our locked hatch. I deployed my crew at the end of the short passageway leading from the main hatch to the power ladder that went down to the main deck.

“Let them into the passageway, then cut them down while they’ve got no place to hide,” I said.

I placed Emon and two other crewmen on the rungs of the ladder, where they could pop up and fire along the passageway. I flattened myself on the deck on the other side of the ladder’s hatch, hugging a rifle in both arms, behind a metal table we dragged out of a crewman’s quarters. Frede and the others were farther down the passageway, at the next ladder-way down, ready to fire at the Skorpis boarders or duck down to the main deck and continue the fight there if the Skorpis got past our first line of defense.

We barely had time to get ourselves set. The Skorpis did not bother trying to melt the hatch’s locking mechanism with a laser. They attached an explosive charge to the hatch and set it off. The blast knocked the heavy metal hatch inward, banging halfway down the passageway. Anyone standing there would have been flattened.

The Skorpis were so big that they had to squeeze through the hatch one at a time. In the dim lighting of the