CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
We had to get down to the launch bay quickly. Looking at the viewport at the front of the bridge, I could see squads of SEALs and Marines heading for the ship like a swarm of locusts. They were armed and trained, but they could not defend themselves unless we opened the launch-bay locks and cleared a path for them.
“Gold 2, prepare!” the mission leader yelled.
A Gold 1 SEAL tripped the door mechanism, and the panels slid open. With the panels just inches apart, another SEAL ran toward the door, somersaulted past the opening, and tossed a grenade into the hall. The guy at the controls closed the panels the moment the grenade cleared.
But nobody made a move for the door, and a moment later an explosion rocked the deck.
“Move it! Move it! Move it!”
The hatch slid open. A cloud of smoke rolled in. Another group of SEALs dashed into the smoke, firing blindly. Even with heat-vision technology in their visors, they would not see anything through the smoke. The heat and fire would cloud their vision.
I was in the second wave to leave. We did not fire our lasers. Had we fired, we would have been more likely to hit one of ours than theirs. We ran into the thick white smoke. If we’d had to breathe that smoke, we might have suffocated, but we had rebreathers.
The floor was red and slick with blood. Looking down to get my balance, I saw armor boots with legs still sticking out of them. The blood looked like a bouillabaisse made with bits of armor instead of fish. The grenade tore holes in the walls.
The silver-red beam of a laser flashed past my head. I dropped to one knee, turned in the direction it had come from, and fired. I could not see the person who fired at me. He had probably not seen me, either. I did not have time to check for the kill. As I stood up to continue my charge, a SEAL slammed into my back. I felt another jolt. No doubt someone had run into him.
One of the SEALs in my group had taken a shot in the thigh as he ran through the hall. Three-quarters of the thigh had disintegrated, leaving a strap of inner thigh that looked like cooked meat. The man vacillated. When he could stand the pain, he rolled onto his stomach and shot at the Mogats. When the pain became too much, he rolled onto his side and wrapped his arms around his legs. He was in that position when a laser struck him in the back and killed him. Even in death, he never released his pistol.
Gold 2 lost four men just fighting its way out of the bridge. I did not even bother counting how many men the Mogats lost. There were dead men and body parts all along the corridor. That grenade had blown some of their men right through walls. Some had been blown into walls that did not give. Bloody starbursts outlined the spots where their bodies struck.
At one moment it did not look like we could possibly clear the hall; and then in the next, we were through that gauntlet. A few Mogats halfheartedly fired at us from behind. They had other problems. A Gold 1 sharpshooter was picking them off from the door of the bridge.
We ran into limited resistance as we made our way across the deck. There might be a man hiding behind a hatch here or a couple of men hiding around a corner there. They were sailors—unused to this kind of combat and completely unorganized. They tried to shoot us from the front instead of letting us pass and hitting us off from the back. We almost always got off the first shot.
“There are elevators down the corridor to the left,” one of the men called over the interLink.
“What are the losses, Gold 2?” the mission leader called.
“At least five so far.”
“Harris, how are you doing up there?” Illych called.
I spotted two Mogats ducking behind a corner a hundred feet ahead and took a skidding right around the next corner to avoid them. I caught the sailor up the hall unawares and shot him as he reached for his pistol. Only after I dropped the guy did I realize he had only been waiting for a lift.
“Not too badly,” I said. Adrenaline and endorphins now flowed through my veins in intoxicating levels. Had they been alcohol, it might have been a big enough dose to kill me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I heard a constant stream of reports from the rest of Gold 2, Gold 1, and Blue Team. If anyone remained alive from Launch Bay Squad, they had gone silent.
Gold 1 and Blue Team were dug in or pinned down, depending on how you wanted to look at the situation. Blue Team had enough men to defend the engine room for now, but no men to spare. Gold 1 had all but welded the hatch to the bridge shut. They disabled it.
As I dragged the dead sailor into the elevator, I heard a report from some other members of Gold 2. They had found a stairwell that led to Deck 3. What they would find when they reached the bottom of the stairs was any man’s guess, but it would not be pretty.
The Mogats must have known we wanted to secure the launch bay. We might have taken the bridge and engineering, but we did not have a prayer of capturing the ship with a mere hundred men. We would need reinforcements, and there was only one place the cavalry would land—launch bay. The Mogats might or might not have figured out about the men we had floating around their ship, but they certainly knew how to stop us from receiving reinforcements.
Remembering the battle my platoon had fought on that derelict battleship, I rode the lift down to the lowest deck. The doors to the elevator opened to a darkened corridor in which no one walked. I felt like a mouse scurrying through a maze. I followed the mainline corridor to the back of the ship and realized I had gone too far. The vault I needed would be almost directly under the launch bay.
As I ran down another hall, I heard, “Hey!”
His shot flew over my shoulder and burrowed into a wall as I spun, dropped to one knee, and fired. I hit the first man. The second jumped back into the open hatch. I could not afford for him to radio for help, so I followed.
I opened the door and entered a mechanics workshop. Across the room, the Mogat fired a wild shot that came far too close, then hid behind a workbench. I aimed at the barrel of solvent behind him. It exploded into a pillar of fire that shot up to the ceiling and rained down in a cascade of flames. I heard the man screaming as I left.
Two decks above me, the twenty-three remaining members of Gold 2 had fought their way out of the stairwell and reached the launch-bay hatch. And there they stopped. They had the same problem that the Mogats had retaking the bridge and engine room. To get into the launch bay, they would need to funnel through a narrow hatch, no more than three at a time.
I found the door marked “Emergency Storage” at the end of the corridor. It was not even locked.
Inside the dimly lit storage area, three mobile firefighting units sat side by side. These were not the big, thirty-foot fire trucks you saw in cities. These were compact three-man units that looked like small tanks. They were ten feet long, small enough to fit on the emergency lift…powerful, but designed for emergency situations, not gunfights.
I lit one of the mobiles up and drove it onto the lift. I had hidden in a shaft just like it as Philips had used his “stiffies” to lead the Mogats away. On that occasion, in that wrecked battleship, I had been content to wait and
