gone faster. With its shields and armor, the transport could have shunted these broken Tomcats out of its way like dried leaves. Instead, we waded through.
“You see anything?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Illych said. “Take a close look when we approach that fighter.”
We glided toward a fighter. It had a gray hull with an oblong nose. The area around its cockpit was entirely melted and the glass was smoke-stained and crumpled. One of the fighter’s wings was sheared off. Wires hung from the amputation.
On the remaining wing, clinging and blending in like a chameleon on a leaf, lay a SEAL. I spotted him because his shape did not blend in with the contour of the wing to which he clung. The color of his armor matched the fighter perfectly. As we passed that fighter, I spotted two more SEALs clinging to the fuselage.
“How long can they stay out there?” I asked Illych.
He thought for a moment. “I’ve gone twelve hours. It wasn’t comfortable.”
“Twelve hours in open space?” I had always heard that you would go insane after two hours. There’s not much you can do in space, just cling to an object like a drowning man holding a raft. No pleasant thoughts would pass through your brain as you sat there with only your armor separating you and an infinite expanse of death. “That must have been one hell of an important mission.”
“It was for training. You don’t get your brantoo until you clear a twelve-hour spacewalk.”
“Do all SEALs go through that?” I asked. Before the Navy switched to Adam Boyd clones, only natural-born volunteers could became SEALs.
“We did,” Illych said. He never talked about the days of natural-born SEALs.
We were coming up on the derelict battleship. I saw it ahead. We approached it from a side that had not been damaged in battle. From this angle, the battleship looked ready to fight.
“You’d better lock the door,” Illych said as he pulled off a pair of headphones.
“The door?” I asked.
“Your buddies in the kettle don’t believe the kid you killed committed suicide. They’re on their way up looking for a killer”
“Have you blocked out external communications?” I asked. The transport had an interLink override that could block passengers from communicating with outside sources.
The door rattled.
“I cut their communications the moment we left,” Illych said. The man had ice in his veins.
The door rattled again. This time someone started pounding on it.
“This will quiet them,” Illych said. He reached across the controls and flipped the switch that controlled the gravity generator.
“Let’s hope no one was taking a shit,” I said.
By the annoyed look Illych shot me, I could tell that he did not approve of my language.
Pounding on a door in zero gravity takes some thinking. Hit the door hard and you will fly in the other direction. Try to shake the door without finding some way to anchor yourself, and you end up shaking yourself instead of the door.
“You’d better do something,” Illych said. “They’re going to pull their lasers next.” The door to the cockpit was made with a laser-dampening clay-and-metal alloy. It would hold for a minute or two of laser abuse.
“How long before we land?” I asked.
“Almost there,” Illych said, still as cool as ever.
I looked through the windshield. We were just outside the launch bay. The door was wide open. The atmospheric locks were disabled. We drifted in and hovered for a moment as Illych rotated the ship.
“Motherbird, we have landed. Repeat, Motherbird, transport one has landed. The coast appears to be clear,” Illych called in.
Outside the cockpit, a dozen laser beams pecked away at our door.
“I believe they’re calling your name,” Illych said.
“Thanks, pal,” I said.
“Harris, I have a present for you.” I looked back and saw him holding out his right hand in a fist, palm up. When he spread his fingers, I saw he was holding a grenade.
“Won’t that damage the transport?” I asked as I took the grenade.
“Not a chance,” Illych said. “It’s a dud.”
“A dud? Why do I want a dud?”
“Those boys are in zero gravity,” Illych said. “Chasing a grenade should keep them busy.”
Illych switched off the emergency bulbs and turned on the cargo lights. The kettle would not be bright by any means, but the commandos would see what I tossed to them.
“Are you going to share in the fun?” I asked Illych as I went to the hatch.
“Sorry, sport, I have to sit this one out. As the only qualified pilot on this mission, I’m indispensable.”
“Indispensable my ass,” I said, knowing that he was right. I put on my helmet. In another moment, having sealed armor would be the deciding factor on who lived and who died.
I opened the door just a crack. In the moment before the storm of lasers speared the door and wall, I saw men floating under the metallic cathedral ceiling. I bowled the grenade underhanded and resealed the door as the first lasers struck around me. Then I waited for the grenade to have its effect.
When I opened the door again, nobody fired at me. The commandos were hiding as best they could and waiting for the grenade to explode.
Had the grenade been real, it would have juiced every last one of them. It would not have destroyed the transport, but it would have done damage. The dud, however, just tumbled harmlessly through the air, causing absolute chaos. The Mogat commandos pushed off each other and collided into one another in their general panic.
The cockpit opened to a three-foot-wide catwalk which led to the ten-foot ladder from the floor of the kettle. Seeing my grenade, everyone had scattered down. When I peered over the ledge of the catwalk, I saw men hiding under benches and men floating pell-mell across the cabin.
“Illych, drop them,” I called over the interLink. He restarted the gravity generator, and the commandos who had been floating dropped to the deck. Then I opened fire.
My job was to distract the commandos. In this case, death was a perfectly acceptable form of distraction. I saw a man hiding behind a girder and fired, hitting him in the arm. He dropped into a crouching position. My next shot hit the top of his helmet.
No one seemed to know what happened, so I targeted another Mogat as he ran to help my first victim. I waited until he bent over with his back to me, then aimed at the knot in his armor that housed his rebreather. He collapsed onto the first guy. It would have looked comical, like one dead guy had tripped over the other, but the rebreather exploded, and flames danced out of the hole.
I had visions of building a pile of dead Mogats.
Another commando looked up in my direction and fired at me before seeing where I hid. His laser seared into the wall about five feet to my left. My shot hit him square in the visor. He fell near the metal doors at the rear of the kettle. So much for my pile.
It felt good to be back in combat. I felt the hormone surging through my blood, but I knew I could stop when the battle was over. Early Liberator clones had crawled out of the tube battle-ready. Most of them got hooked on violence because they never knew anything else. I was raised in an orphanage and steeped in military protocol. Self-control was less of an issue.
At least twenty commandos fired back at me. I ducked low. I had the high-ground advantage. They could hit the catwalk, but they could not hit me. Some guy bucking for a medal leaped toward the front of the kettle. He probably wanted to shoot up from under the catwalk. He might have even planned to shoot through it. I hit him as he jumped, and he fell facedown on the deck.
“Grab a handhold,” Illych called over the interLink.
As I wedged myself into a corner, Illych cut the gravity. A commando immediately launched himself in the air. I shot him, and his dead body slammed headfirst into the roof.
