overbalancing. Every heartbeat swelled me tighter against the oven of my armor.
Stephen crashed upward. I staggered toward the single hatch out of the compartment. My vision was so focused that I didn't know whether Stephen was behind or beside me. Molts had squeezed against the internal bulkhead when the deck burst in a fireball near the curve of the hull. They scattered to either side of my advance like chickens running from the axe.
I pushed at the hatch. It didn't move. I raised my bar to cut through. Stephen reached past me and pulled the handle open.
I lurched into a corridor ten meters long. It was full of Fed personnel, human and Molt. A four-barreled cannon on a wheeled carriage faced one companionway; a tripod-mounted laser whose separate power pack must weigh fifty kilos was aimed at the open hatch of the other.
An officer wearing gold-chased body armor turned and pointed his gun at me. The weapon had a thick barrel with only a tiny hole in the middle of it, and the stock fitted into a special rest on the breastplate.
I swung my bar at the Fed. He was too far away for me to reach before he fired. A starship hit and spun me around. I bounced onto the floor on my back. My faceshield was unlatched, but the helmet had rotated sideways 20° to cut off part of my vision.
Stephen stepped across my body with his flashgun raised. I threw my left arm across my eyes. Side-scatter from Stephen's bolt glared off the corridor's dingy white walls. A crate of shells for the cannon blew up like so many grenades. Stephen fell over me.
I twisted out from under his legs. The blast had knocked down the nearest Feds as well, though the crew of the laser five meters away at the opposite end of the corridor was trying to swing its weapon onto us. The cable to the power pack wasn't flexible enough for them to change front without repositioning all their equipment.
I jerked off my helmet and flung it at the Feds. The four Molts gripping the power pack's carrying handles continued stolidly to walk it around.
I could see again and I could breathe. The officer's projectile had hit the top of my breastplate at a flat angle. It shattered the plate and tore loose the clamps holding plastron, gorget, and helmet together.
Half my breastplate flopped from the waist latches. Ceramic continued to crumble away in bits from the broken edge, because the shock had completely shattered the plate's internal structure. Breath was a sharp pain. I didn't know whether the chest muscles were bruised or if cracked ribs were ripping my lungs every time I moved.
I walked toward the laser. I would have run, but my backplate clanked behind me like a ceramic cape and caught my heels.
A human sailor with a full mustache and sideburns that swept up to bright chestnut hair gaped at me. He was wearing padded protective gear like that of the gunners on the deck below. He dropped his side of the laser and sprang toward the companionway hatch.
His human officer shot him in the back with her double-barreled pistol. She aimed at me past the power supply. Her head jerked back, and she fired the pistol into the ceiling as her nerves spasmed.
Her body toppled forward. There was a bullet hole over her right eye, and her brains splashed the bulkhead behind her.
I hacked at a Molt. He staggered back, bleeding from the stump of an arm and the deep cut in his carapace.
The nearest Molt wrapped his hard-surfaced arms around me while the others scrambled toward the cross- corridor at the end of the main one. They kept the power pack between me and them. Stephen fired his rifle again, but not in my direction. I cut awkwardly at the Molt's back. My limbs were still in their jointed ceramic cylinders, and the damned backplate dragged at me like an anchor.
The Molt moaned through the breathing holes along his lateral lines. My bar wouldn't bite-the battery was drained. I screamed in frustration, pounding the Molt with the pommel. He slipped down under the impacts, but his arms wouldn't release. His skull was a mush of fluids and broken chitin, but he wouldn't let go.
Stephen grabbed the Molt's shoulder with his left gauntlet and flung the corpse away from me. I staggered against the jamb of the hatchway. I wanted to get rid of the backplate, but I couldn't turn the studs behind me. I stripped off my right gauntlet instead as Stephen closed the firing contacts of the Federation laser and hosed its throbbing light across the other gun crew.
Stephen's flashgun was a monopulse weapon. This tripod-mounted unit had two separate tubes. It sequenced its output through them in turn to avoid the downrange vapor attenuation that reduced continuous-beam lasers' effectiveness.
The Fed officer who'd shot me was loading another fat cartridge into the breech of his weapon. The beam glanced from his polished breastplate in dazzling highlights, then hit him in the neck and decapitated him.
I flung away my left gauntlet. My hands curled with pleasure at being free. The backplate latches turned easily.
Two Molts were starting to rise. Their thoraces burst soggily as the beam vaporized soft parts within the chitin shell.
A man in Venerian armor with his chest burned out lay just within the companionway hatch. He was probably the fellow who'd gone on while I helped Stephen into the hold. He held a rifle, and a cutting bar was clipped to his armor.
Exploding ammunition had knocked the multibarrel cannon sideways in the corridor. Stephen concentrated his flux on the breechblocks. The laser's feedline was beginning to smoke. The unit should have been allowed to cool every few seconds between bursts. Stephen was deliberately destroying both the weapons that could endanger a man in a Venerian hard suit.
Shells in the four cannon barrels cooked off in quick succession. Three of the weakened breeches failed, flinging fragments of jagged tool steel across the corridor and shredding two of the Molts who'd been crippled by the initial blast. There had been another human gunner also, but she must have run down the end corridor.
I took the cutting bar from the dead Venerian's waist stud and started up the companionway. My armored boots clanged on the slotted metal treads. I hadn't had time to take off the leg pieces.
The important thing was that my face and chest were free. The weight didn't matter so much, but days of constriction had driven me almost mad.
Or beyond almost.
The companionway was full of smoke from the fire on the lower deck, but because the air wasn't circulating the conditions weren't as bad as I'd thought they would be. I wished I'd thought to detach the oxygen bottle from my suit; but I hadn't, and anyway the projectile that smashed the breastplate had likely damaged the regulator as well.
Shots and screams echoed up the tube. Some of what sounded like human agony probably came from machines. I wondered if other members of the assault party had climbed this high. Movement in hard suits was brutally exhausting, and other men hadn't had Stephen to help them forward.
The hatch onto the next deck was closed but not dogged tight. I could hear people raggedly singing a hymn on the other side. The leader was a female, and hers was the only voice that didn't sound terrified. I passed the hatch by and turned up the final angle of the companionway to the highest deck.
The hatch was sealed. I tugged at an arm of the central wheel. They'd locked it from the inside. I paused, thinking about the hatches I'd seen on the
A bullet howled up the companionway. It or a bit of it dropped at my feet, a silvery gleam, before it rattled its way back down through the stair treads.
The locks were electrical, activated by a button in the center on the inner dogging wheel. The powerline ran through the upper hinge.
I set my bar's tip on the hatch side of the hinge and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I was dizzy from smoke and fatigue. I'd forgotten that the dead man wouldn't have slung his bar with the power switch on.
I thumbed the slide and tried again. The blade screamed angrily and sank into the tough steel. Chips, yellow and blazing white, spewed from the cut. The severed power cable shorted through the hatch metal in a brief halo of blue sparks.
I tugged again on the wheel. This time it spun freely, three full turns to withdraw the bolts which clamped the hatch to its jamb. I grasped the vertical handhold, pulled the hatch toward me, and charged onto the bridge of
