The guards came tromping toward me, firing blind in my direction. Silver-red lasers streaked past me and seared the wall of the corridor. I pushed hard against a bulkhead and launched myself full speed down the hall. Laser fire followed me, striking walls and floors moments behind me.
Under normal circumstances, I would not have worried about three untrained idiots shooting lasers in my direction. Judging by the spread of their shots, they would not hit me unless they were aiming at somebody else. But this was different. Under normal circumstances I could fire back. This time I could only run away.
I continued just ahead of them, feeling no panic. The combat hormone flowed through me, keeping my mind keen. I pushed off walls, turning right and left down whatever small arteries looked clear. I found a ladder shaft leading between two decks and shot up to the next deck. The Mogats came ambling after me, leaving their transports completely unguarded. Once I reached the top of the ladder, I had to slow down to keep from losing them.
I turned one corner, then the next. Moving at this speed with little depth perception, I slid past several junctions too fast to change direction. Lasers struck the walls above and below me. The Mogats were closing in.
Nearing the end of a corridor, I managed to push off a wall and bounce into a long foyer. It was an ugly, abrupt change in direction that I made by kicking off one wall and slamming headfirst into another, before rolling sideways into the entryway. The maneuver sent a shock down my shoulders and back.
“Illych, report,” I said.
“I’m in,” Illych said.
“You have the pilot?”
“Sure.”
When I peered out the hatch, I saw the Mogats ducking for cover at the other end of the corridor. One of them shined a light in my direction, pointing it above my head. It was comical. These boys were so poorly trained. The commando stuck his head way out to get a good look, then fired blindly down the hall, missing me by several yards.
“You took out the pilot?” I asked.
“Done,” Illych said.
The idiot fired again. This time he was less than three feet off. For the first time, I started to worry about them spotting me.
“Have you traded clothes?” I asked. The plan was for Illych to kill the transport pilot, then change places with him. Illych would dress the pilot in his Special Operations armor and dress himself in the pilot’s flight gear. He would do so in the pressurized cockpit, the only place on the entire battleship in which we could now control the environment.
“It’s not a very good fit. Their pilot had a few inches on me. I’m not sure which looks worse, him crammed into my armor or me in his flight gear.”
“Worry about that later,” I said. The guards were back to missing me by five or six feet, all aiming at the same blank spot on the wall.
“I’m under fire here. How soon can you get the body out?”
“It’s out, sir,” Illych said, as casually as if he were talking about the weather.
He’d killed the pilot, stolen his clothes, and prepared the body to use as a decoy in a minute at most. I was impressed but did not feel like saying so. “Nice of you to let me know,” I said, looking for something to complain about.
“I just placed him a moment ago, sir,” Illych said.
“Who gets to play fox next?” I asked.
“Ready,” one of the SEALs reported.
I pressed the button on the jamming device. Now I had to stay out of sight and hope the Mogats were every bit as dumb as they acted. Somewhere below me, one of the SEALs shut off his stealth kit and entered the corridor behind the Mogats.
Springing to the ceiling, where they would be slightly less likely to spot me, I watched the Mogats leave. All the Mogats knew was that I had somehow vanished from their tracking devices. They did not know how to respond. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have known that I had jammed their security system. These idiots simply crawled out from behind their cover, shrugged their shoulders, and started back to their post, apparently convinced that I had found a passage between decks.
Illych was right. These guys should not have been winning the war.
I found an open duct and crawled into the ventilation system. There I waited as Illych and his team carried out their plan. Illych, wearing space gear belonging to the recently deceased Mogat pilot, would crawl back into the cockpit of the Mogat transport. Another SEAL would lead the Mogats to the body of the pilot and initiate a firefight. Though he had orders not to, the SEAL would probably kill a few of the Mogats for the fun of it.
Once the firefight got hot enough, our boy would offer them their pilot dressed in SEAL armor as a target. He would hold the dead pilot up for them to shoot. If they did not blast the decoy in the head, our SEAL would do it himself. All the proprietary technology in SEAL armor was located in the helmet. The SEALs would not allow a working helmet to fall into enemy hands.
As soon as the Mogats managed to kill their already-dead pilot, our SEAL would push the corpse out into the open and slip away unnoticed by all.
These tactics would not have worked had we been fighting a veteran army, but this was the Mogats. With their security sensors jammed, the Mogats would happily assume they had killed the lone intruder on their ship. Even if they continued looking for us, we could listen in on their conversations and avoid them. Sooner or later they would decide they had won the battle and leave.
Once the Mogats left, the only thing I would have to deal with was that I was stranded on a dead battleship in a deep-space graveyard with no way of contacting Earth.
In the same situation, Illych would have said, “No problem.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Well, they’re gone,” I said.
We stood on the bridge of the derelict battleship watching the Mogat transports rendezvous with their battleship. Two destroyers loomed in the background like guardian angels. Hundreds of twisted wrecks floated about the scene.
“Do you think they’ll be back, Colonel?” one of the SEALs asked.
“Sooner or later. We should be long gone by then,” I said.
“Do you think Illych will be okay?” the SEAL asked.
“You know him better than I do, but I think he can take care of himself.” I believed that. Master Chief Petty Officer Emerson Illych had proven himself in my book. Now that he was on one of the Mogat battleships, he would lose himself among the crew. What could he do once he reached their base? He seemed resourceful. All of these Boyd clones seemed resourceful.
“What now, sir?” one of the SEALs asked.
I told them about the broadcast engine and sent them out to find any other systems that might be online. I did not think they would find anything, but their helmets would record everything they saw. They might stumble across something without knowing it.
In the meantime, I remained on the bridge. I removed data chips from the navigation computer and searched for maps, charts, and anything else that looked valuable. I found nothing. The bridge had been stripped clean. No surprise.
The strange thing was, as long as the Mogats did not return, we could have lived on that ship for days. There
