The Crypt: Shakedown: (A Military Sci-Fi Novel), page 45
That would angle Keeling’s tail between the X-Ray and Yankee, adding a few more seconds to the enemy torpedoes’ run-time.
Trav turned and looked up at Hasik. “Xeno, you have three minutes until we dive.”
99
The torturer dragged him into the airlock.
He would not go home.
He would not see his people.
He would not be a hero.
He would not be with Bethany.
The airlock’s door shut.
Was this High One’s plan? It had to be. Everything was. Nitzan clung to that belief, for it was all he had left.
He’d come so close.
“I’m actually kind of a nice person,” his torturer said. “I’m going to do you a little favor. When the airlock opens, I’ll get you out the back as fast as I can. You can die in the void. I think a Raider would like that—or a Crusader, if that’s what you are.”
That was a favor?
Yes, it was. Anything to stop the pain, although the pain had faded somewhat. He was numb, no longer a slave to the agony rippling through his body.
She’d cut off his arm.
She’d cut out his tongue.
She’d cut off his left foot. That one had taken some work. The wicked copper blade hadn’t got the job done, so she’d pulled his combat knife—a knife so dense and sharp it would punch through exo-armor—and used it like a hatchet, hacking at the bone and gristle of his ankle. He’d heard it when she finally pulled his foot free, a squelching sound like a spoon digging into a hot, fresh bowl of macaroni and cheese.
“It was nice to get to know you a little,” the torturer said. “People in our line of work… well, professional courtesy is a must.”
He heard her words, but he didn’t care.
He’d lost. She’d won.
“If you have any last prayers, make them now,” the torturer said.
Nitzan wished he could have said goodbye to his team.
To say goodbye to Abshire, to tell him that fair didn’t matter, that he could survive this.
To say goodbye to Beaver and tell the kid that while he’d been so annoying at first, his endless, genuine optimism had worn Nitzan down.
To say goodbye to Grampa Bennett, who—for a Union heathen—was a genuinely good man.
Just like Arimun had been.
“If your afterlife is real, I hope you get to go there,” the torturer said. “Bethany, hon? Shut off fakegrav in the cargo hold. Right away.”
The torturer pulled a lever.
Nitzan heard air hiss out of the small chamber, loud at first but quickly tapering off as there was no air to carry sound.
The Raiders had trained him about being exposed in vacuum. Like a checklist read off by a drill sergeant, Nitzan knew each effect as it happened.
Fresh agony bloomed in his face as his sinuses struggled to equalize.
Piercing pain as his eardrums ruptured.
Were his muscles cramping from the bends? Hard to tell with the misery that already racked his body, courtesy of his little torturer.
She dragged him out of the airlock by his collar. One hard tug, then a light pull, and he was floating.
The cold…
Things were happening to his ruined body but he didn’t care, because if there was an afterlife, he would spend it at High One’s side.
His eyes stung. His mouth was dry.
The torturer pulled him through the cargo hold, through bodies floating near the deck, through shell casings and escape wings that slowly tumbled through the air.
So many dead Unionites.
Would they spend eternity at High One’s side?
Nitzan hoped they would, but he knew better. The Union was made of blasphemers and perverts, of sinners and butchers.
They weren’t like him.
They weren’t like Bethany.
His vision grew cloudy as the wetness of his eyes boiled away. Everything was out of focus.
And then, he was in space, looking back at the hauler’s open rear cargo door, at Major Anne Lafferty, Intel Chief of the PUV James Keeling. She was so blurry he could barely make her out, but he saw enough to know she was waving goodbye.
100
“Just identified that big fattie cloud at seven o’clock,” Biggie said on the platoon channel. “That’s a Malag destroyer. It’s launched torps.”
Beaver grabbed John’s arm.
“Hey, Bennett, is that bad?”
“Yes, Beaver,” John said. “An enemy destroyer chasing us down and launching torpedoes is bad.”
From the looks of things, bad was soon to get worse. John was no navigator, but his naked eye told him the Ochthera would reach Keeling only minutes before the big Malag started shooting the hell out of everything.
Off to port, something caught John’s eye. Hard to tell in the STC soup, but it looked like tiny pulses of yellow and orange light.
“Biggie, this is Bennett up top,” John said. “I think I see a distress beacon at nine o’clock high.”
The Ochthera’s turret rotated to port. The cannon elevated.
“I see it,” Nikula said. “Got it in my optics… definitely a beacon, and… hard to tell, but that might be Cooley’s hauler.”
That wasn’t where the hauler was supposed to be. Why was it closer to the destroyer than it was to Keeling?
“If that’s the hauler, it’s straight-lining,” Biggie said. “No acceleration, no maneuvering, traveling on momentum alone. It will miss Keeling by a country mile. Master Sergeant Sands, if those on board bail out, they can grab on to us topside. We can still get to Keeling on time, but it’ll be close. What are your orders?”
Sands was the mission’s commander. Biggie was dumping the choice on him, as she should—it was his call, and his alone.
“Hey, Sarge Sands,” Beaver said “Shamdi’s girlfriend is driving the hauler. He’s gone, but we could save her for him.”
A pause.
“Let’s get her, Sarge,” Abshire said. “We owe it to Nitzie.”
“Major Lafferty’s supposedly on board, too,” Jordan said.
“And maybe people from Ishi,” Basara said. “We can’t abandon them.”
“Do it, Sarge,” Sarvacharya said.
Another pause.
What an impossible decision for Sands to make. His surviving Raiders were in the clear, but not if he went for the hauler. No way to communicate with the hauler from this far out. Everyone aboard could be already dead, which meant a diversion toward it put the platoon in danger for nothing. Of course the Raiders wanted to go after their own; that was what Raiders did. Sands, though, was responsible for bringing his people home. He’d already lost Fred Abeen, Malik Blanding, and Karl Chennault. Their bodies—at least parts of them—were on the deck in the troop compartment. And Nitzan was lost to the whims of war.
The correct decision was to fly straight for Keeling and get out of there.
But John knew Francis “Book” Sands. Knew him from way back when. The man just needed a little nudge, a nudge from someone he respected.
“Master Sergeant,” John said, “if we leave without knowing if there’s people alive in that hauler, I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep at night.”
John wasn’t sleeping at night anyway, a silver-eyed rat-shrimp-thing saw to that, but that wasn’t the point.
“All right,” Sands said. “Let’s roll them bones. Warrant Officer Bang, get us to the hauler. Start broadcasting a tightbeam signal, tell them to abandon ship. Hopefully they receive it as we get closer.”
101
“I see it,” Susannah said. “I see the crawler!”
“Then get back here fast.”
Susannah lurched out of the pilot’s seat. She tried to ignore the pornography and the bloody smears, handprints, and footprints that covered the deck. She entered the airlock and shut the inner door.
For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to her that the airlock, too, would be bloody.
Susannah checked her vacsuit HUD: sealed and pressurized.
She opened the cargo-side airlock door and stepped out into an abattoir.
Bodies and blood foam floated everywhere, all slowly moving and turning at different rates. Some corpses had big holes in them. Others were missing limbs. Some were missing heads. Here and there, a severed hand, frozen coils of intestine, a few internal organs, even what appeared to be the left hemisphere of a brain in remarkably good shape.
Move, my child.
Susannah cried out as she pushed through the bodies, bodies that were so thick she could barely see to the cargo container’s end. The corpses seemed to be alive, seemed to be landing soft kicks, punches, and slaps on her as she moved. She shoved a dead man aside, his left eye staring out, frozen forever, his right missing along with that half of his face.
She should have turned the fakegrav back on, but it was too late now.
A dead hand reached for her, grabbed her wrist and pulled her aft.
Susannah screamed.
“Relax, Ensign.”
Lafferty stood there, two escape wings under one arm, her free hand locked on Susannah’s wrist. What looked like a hunk of freeze-dried liver floated above Lafferty’s head.
“Take a wing,” the major said.
Susannah took one and checked the charge level—down to a quarter full. That would have to do.
The major gripped the handles of her wing, turned to face the open loading door. Bodies and body parts were slowly drifting into space. She stepped out, and the wing’s small engines carried her away from the hauler.
Susannah followed her into the silence of the void.
Low and off to the left, Susannah saw the oncoming Ochthera, attitude thrusters sparking at all corners as the pilot fought to decelerate, match velocity, and come up alongside. It felt like driving on a highway, watching a car on the onramp drift closer and closer.
Atop the crawler, a lethal-looking turret, and three crouching Raiders in black TASH armor waving her in.
For a moment, Susannah’s mind rejected what her eyes were telling her. They told her she and Lafferty were stationary, that the Ochthera and the reaching Raiders floated closer and closer. She knew, though, that wasn’t how physics worked. She, Lafferty, and the crawler were hurtling along at some insane velocity.
Raider hands reached up, grabbed Lafferty and pulled her down atop the metal netting affixed to the crawler’s roof.
Their black armor… just like Nitzan’s…
The hands snatched Susannah, yanked her down.
“Ensign, anyone left aboard?”
There, atop an armored personal carrier, Susannah Rossi pissed herself. It was the Empty Man, John Bennett, gauntleted hands gripping her shoulders, talking to her through a touch-channel. No black flames raging from his eyes, no vibrating dark haze, but she was not fooled—it was him.
“No,” Susannah said. “We’re the only survivors.”
“On your belly,” the Empty Man said. “Hurry.”
Susannah did as she was told. The Empty Man put his arm over her, held her tight to the crawler’s top. She couldn’t look at him. She turned her head and found herself staring at the blood-speckled face of Anne Lafferty, only centimeters away.
Lafferty stretched out a finger, touched Susannah’s arm.
“Isn’t this amazing, Beth? We might make it after all.”
Beth. The butcher called her Beth.
Past Lafferty, past the Raider holding Lafferty down, Susannah saw the Keeling. Beautiful Keeling. Beautiful, even when it was fuzzy and blurred, the copper hull whipping in and out of focus.
Beneath her, the crawler shuddered and accelerated.
Susannah put her visor against the metal netting. That way, she didn’t have to look at the face of the Empty Man, nor did she have to look at the beatific smile of Anne Lafferty.
102
The crawler drifted toward Keeling’s open pouch. Anne thought it felt like being atop a balloon in a light breeze, flowing forward, floating upward.
Inside the flight bay, Raiders in LASH armor and sailors in vacsuits hovered in place, safety lines attached to their backs.
“Stay flat, Major,” Abshire said on their touch-channel. “Not a lot of room between us and the ceiling.”
The Ochthera slid into the pouch. Tiny attitude thrusters spouted spurts of vapor as the pilot tried to bring the crawler in without bumping the sides or—more importantly—the top, which might squish Anne’s and Beth’s unarmored bodies into a meaty pudding.
Anne looked back, saw the pouch closing behind her like a copper-lipped fish mouth. When it silently slammed shut, gravity returned with barely a bump as the Ochthera settled onto the deck.
103
In the orb, three torpedoes closed in on Keeling, the first of which was just under four minutes out. The Mark15s had eliminated one of Yankee’s torps, and the decoys had taken out one of X-Ray’s.
“Crawler-Two is aboard,” Cooley said. “Pouch door sealed. One Raider MIA, unrecoverable. Ensign Darkwater and Major Lafferty recovered from Hauler-One, no one else.”
Where were all those rescued from Ishi? Had the hauler brought no one in after all?
Even if Trav’s crew could eliminate the three incoming torps, both X-Ray and Yankee were close to effective firing range. If Keeling wasn’t in transdim inside of three minutes, it would be either captured or destroyed.
“Xeno, crash-dive,” Trav said. “Colonel Cooley, alert the crew.”
Hasik repeated the order down to the atrium. Cooley made the announcement on the 1MC.
“Activating transdim coupler,” Hasik said.
Trav gripped the edge of the command slate. What would he see this time? His sixth membrane-hop in less than an hour. How would it affect the crew? The Raiders in the landing bay were fully armed. Would they…
Nothing happened.
“Xeno,” Trav said, “why are we still in realspace?”
“It didn’t go!” Hasik’s voice shot up an octave. “I told you the power was low!”
Trav stepped to the Xeno loft and looked up at the man.
“Hasik, get us under, right now, or we’re dead.”
Behind his glasses, Hasik’s tired, raw eyes blinked madly.
“When the dive failed, the coupler’s energy reserve dropped to zero,” he said. “I don’t know what else to do. Neither does Hathorn. Maybe Darkwater does, she seems to have an affinity for—”
Trav stepped to the command slate, took the handset from Cooley.
“This is the XO. Ensign Darkwater to the atrium, immediately. Darkwater, you have ninety seconds to get us into transdim or we’re all dead.” He pressed the handset against his chest to mute it. “ECM, launch all remaining countermeasures. Weps, split remaining Mark15s and Mark16s between Yankee and X-Ray. Fire when ready.”
As his crew repeated his orders, Trav switched the comm to the 18MC—the direct line to the atrium.
104
Susannah stepped off the ladder and sprinted through the strangely curved passageway to the atrium’s sealed sphincter. She rubbed her hand along the edge—it opened instantly, spreading apart with a pop of air.
She rushed in, the warm steam of an old friend caressing her face.
The heartstone was dimmer than Susannah had ever seen, mere hints of light pulsing within the thick material. Hathorn stood on the protuberance platform.
The protuberance was dark. Lifeless. Like black glass.
Hathorn looked at Susannah, cheeks wet with tears and snot gleaming on her upper lip.
“I can’t get it to charge,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Next to Hathorn, the comm unit blared with the XO’s voice.
“Atrium, Conn, torpedoes incoming. You have seventy seconds to get us under.”
In the blink of an eye, all lives depended on Susannah Rossi, and Susannah Rossi alone.
Everything faded away.
The horror of the hauler’s cargo compartment.
The insanity of Lafferty cutting Nitzan into pieces.
Nitzan trying to take her to the destroyer.
Lafferty suddenly, genuinely thinking Susannah was her friend.
Bock’s blackmail.
Bratchford’s attempted rape.
Murdering Bratchford.
Chief Marchenko’s secret present.
The lost ten years in the convent.
Melanie’s severed head, rolling around the debris-strewn deck.
Lafferty’s copper knife…
…the blood, both on the knife and then not on the knife.
Susannah knew what the ship wanted.
She knew what the voice wanted.
“Sixty seconds,” Ellis said.
Susannah came back to the moment. Vibrations rippled through the deck—one of Keeling’s cannons firing.
She ran to the protuberance, but instead of stepping onto the platform with Hathorn, she dropped to one knee and reached under it. Susannah’s cheek pressed against the platform as her hand fished about in the narrow, dark space.
Where was it?
Hathorn screamed in frustration. She sobbed as she repeated the activation pattern, a pattern that would do nothing without power.
Power. Power was life. Life was power.
Susannah stuck her hand farther in, swept it left—she felt it, grabbed it.
She stood, the copper blade low and flat against her thigh, the duct-tape handle cool against her palm.
“Fifty seconds,” Ellis said.
Marchenko had given Susannah the blade. In the mess, at breakfast, he’d sat down next to her, hadn’t said a word as he slid the blade across the seat. Susannah had taken it and hidden it—first in her coveralls, then under the platform. She hadn’t known why then, and until now she hadn’t even remembered the exchange.
But she remembered now, and now, she knew why.
You know what must be done, my child.
Yes. Susannah knew.
Hathorn shook her head, screamed again. She punched the protuberance hard enough to split her knuckles, smearing a streak of blood on the dark glass.
