smoke-filled passage I saw the first one step through, a heavy rifle pointed straight ahead, helmet brushing the overhead, cat’s eyes peering into the darkness warily. We could have potted him easily, but I wanted that passageway filled with as many of their boarding party as possible before we started mowing them down.
They were wearing body armor. They trudged down the passageway carefully, their boots as noiseless as cat’s feet on the metal deck plates. Emon and his two crewmates kept their heads down, out of sight, waiting as they clung to the ladder’s rungs. I huddled behind the overturned table, scarcely breathing.
The Skorpis warriors stood for several moments, as if waiting for something. Then I heard a muffled explosion from somewhere. And another. They were blowing in our auxiliary hatches! They must have assault teams in space suits breaking into the ship from all three hatches at once!
My brilliant plan was mincemeat. We had to get down onto the main deck and fight at least three boarding parties at once.
“Fire!” I screamed as I raised myself to my knees and cut the first Skorpis in half with a bolt from my rifle.
My senses went into overdrive and the world around me slowed into a dreamlike torpor. I saw Emon and his little team raise their heads leisurely above the ladder hatch’s sill and squeeze the triggers of their rifles. More laser beams came sizzling over my head from Frede and her team. The Skorpis warriors, huge and clumsy in the confines of the passageway, died in their tracks, slumping to their knees as laser beams burned holes through their armor, falling sluggishly, weapons dropping from their lifeless fingers. Their death screams sounded like eerie keening wails, echoing off the passageway’s metal bulkheads. Their bodies even blocked the hatch, making it difficult for more of them to get in.
But they fired as they fell. They died fighting. More of them pushed through the bodies of their own dead to worm their way on their bellies toward us.
“Everybody down to the main deck,” I yelled.
Too late. One of the dying warriors pulled a grenade from his equipment belt and tossed it toward the hatch. I saw it wobbling on a lazy arc toward Emon and his crewmen. I fired at it, hit it, and it exploded in a shower of white-hot shrapnel. Howls of pain came from the ladderway. A body thudded down onto the main deck.
I crawled along the deck plates, firing into the crouching Skorpis who were using their own dead as shields for themselves. I rolled headfirst down into the ladder well, grabbed a rail and let myself slide down the rest of the way to the main deck.
Emon’s head and shoulders were covered with blood, his own and his crewmates’. One of the men sprawled dead on the deck, the other clutched a shredded arm with one hand.
“I’m okay,” Emon said. “I can still shoot.” But when he tried to stand he staggered into my arms.
I pulled him away from the ladderway and into the comparative safety of a compartment hatch. Then I went back and got the other wounded man. I saw laser beams zipping past the open ladder hatch, up above.
Sitting the wounded man against the bulkhead of the compartment, I told Emon, “The Skorpis will be pouring down that ladderway in a few moments.”
“I’ll hold ’em off,” he said, hefting his rifle in bloodied hands.
“Do the best you can,” I said. I left him there and sprinted down the passageway toward Frede and the rest of our crew.
“They blew the other hatches,” I told her.
“I heard it.”
“Get those people down here.” I pointed to the crew who were still firing from the top of the ladder. “We’ll make our stand in the cargo bay.”
“Right.”
They must know that we’re carrying Anya in this ship. For some reason they want her alive. They don’t want her to surrender to the Commonwealth, but they’d rather take her back to Hegemony territory, if they can.
I ran past the dead and smoking bridge, ducked down the ladderway to the lower deck and raced for the cargo hold where Anya’s cryosleep capsule lay. Her sarcophagus, I thought.
Four Skorpis warriors were already prying the cargo bay hatch open when I hit the lower deck. They were in space suits and did not hear me running up the passageway toward them. I gave them no chance. I fired my rifle from the hip as I ran toward them. The oxygen tanks on their life-support systems exploded, blowing them to sticky shreds.
Twelve more space-suited warriors came pounding up the passageway from the other end, where the air- lock hatch was. Too many for me to handle by myself, especially when they were firing laser rifles at me. I backpedaled, then turned and ran into the nearest protective hatch. I found myself in the transceiver station, a flat open bay with a small console standing to one side.
Using the passageway hatch to shelter me, I fired at the Skorpis who stood near the cargo bay hatch. I saw one sag and slide down the bulkhead, his helmet smoking where my rifle beam had caught him. The others turned toward me, in dreamlike slow motion, raising their rifles toward me. I fired twice, shattering a helmet visor and burning a hole through the arm of another Skorpis. They backed away, firing. I ducked back inside the transceiver bay hatch.
A standoff. They could not get into the cargo bay; neither could I.
I wondered if the ship was still hurtling toward Loris, and if the planet’s defensive systems would blast the Skorpis battle cruiser and us with it. Or had the cruiser’s captain maneuvered us away from our collision course with the planet?
Footsteps running up the passageway. I glanced out and saw Frede leading the rest of the crew. I counted only thirty.
“Look out!” I yelled. “They’re at the other end of the passageway, by the cargo bay hatch.”
Frede and her people flattened out against the bulkheads, firing and being fired upon as they, one by one, ducked into the transceiver bay with me.
“We caught the other boarding party coming through the after hatch,” she said. “Took some casualties.”
“So I see.” None of them were unwounded. Frede’s face was smeared with blood and sweat.
But she grinned. “We wiped them out. Killed every last one of those damned cats.”
That leaves only a couple of hundred, I thought. It was obvious that the Skorpis battle cruiser had attached itself to our air lock. We were not dealing with a shuttle load of warriors, not the way they were pouring reinforcements into our ship.
“They’re regrouping down the passageway,” I said. “Probably getting reinforcements before they charge us.”
“The first landing party, up by the main air lock—”
“They’ll be coming down here the same way you came. We’ll have our hands full.”
“Still thinking of taking their ship?”
I laughed bitterly.
Looking over the ragged remains of my crew, I saw that little Jerron was badly burned in the abdomen and left leg. He lay panting, wide-eyed with shock, with our medical officer bending over him.
“Magro,” I called to the comm officer. “Can you power up the transceiver?”
He was grimy and breathing hard, like all the others. But he gave me a nod and said, “I can try, sir.”
“What are you thinking?” Frede asked.
Peering down the dimly lit, smoky passageway, I could see no Skorpis. They were beyond the air-lock hatch, preparing their next attack on us.
“They want the cryo capsule in the cargo hold,” I told Frede. “Maybe we can beam it down to the planet.”
“We’d have to drag it in here,” Frede objected.
“We could cut through the bulkhead. Are there any flight packs stashed in that cargo bay? That would make it easier to move the capsule.”
Clearly, she did not think much of my idea. But she said, “I’ll get a couple of people to cut through the bulkhead.”
Nodding, I turned my attention back to the empty passageway. The Skorpis could cut through the ship’s
