Hal Colebatch - Man-Kzin Wars – XIII

“Atmosphere?”

“Standard, but a lot of hydrogen mixed in. They must have fuel leaks throughout the ship.”

A leak which Thrarm-Captain didn’t want entering his own ship any longer than necessary. Hydrogen’s flammability was the least of his worries: its monoatomic ability to undermine solids-metals, synthetics, composites-by simply passing through them led to a condition called brittlization. After enough exposure, gaskets disintegrated, steel sheeting crumbled like desiccated plastic. “Move quickly, then. What about their inner airlock door?”

“Battle damage, but I can hear someone pounding behind it.”

“How bad is the damage?”

“Bad enough, Thrarm-Captain.”

“That answer is no answer, Corporal. Tell me what needs to be done to open the door and how long it will take.”

“Beam-torch: three minutes, maybe four.”

“Then do it, and quickly.”

“At the run, Thrarm-Captain.”

Within seconds, the sparking glow of a beam-torch flickered inside the airlock. Satisfied, Thrarm-Captain caught the squad leader’s eye and made a grasping “to-me” hand gesture. The kzin noncom came immediately.

Thrarm-Captain leaned their space helmets together. He muted his radio feed and said, “This concerns me, squad leader.”

“The amount of time this is taking, or the possibility of treachery?”

“Both. I want you to summon two more squads to this area, but do not deploy them around the airlock. Keep them back, in staggered positions, protecting all junctures, all the way back to the main passageway and command bulkheads.”

“Yes, Thrarm-Captain.” And then the troop leader was gone, already summoning in the squads and preparing a defensive network with multiple fallback positions.

Thrarm-Captain toggled his radio open again. “zh-Sensor: report.”

“We are now twenty-four light-seconds behind the van. This puts us abreast of the leading elements of the rearguard, now.”

“Yes. And the Raker?”

“Sir, no activity at all, except that its power output continues to diminish steadily.”

“The human ships?”

“The ones which attacked the Raker fell back and have merged into the front rank of the leaf-eating harriers that are pushing us before them. But nothing else: no sign of heavier human hulls inbound.”

“Very well. Inform me at once of any changes.”

“Yes, Thrarm-Captain. I will-”

That was when, with a shrill screech of high-pressure atmosphere, the beam-torch team cut through the Raker’s inner airlock door: a brief wash of low-pressure flame flared up as it did. The operator quickly switched off the torch.

“What the Patriarch’s entrails just happened?” demanded Thrarm-Captain, instinctively moving closer to the source of the surprise.

“Thrarm-Captain, the atmosphere on the other side of the door is under tremendous pressure.” The high-pitched keening of the in-pouring gases almost made his report inaudible.

At that moment, a toxicity alarm started yowling and the specialist with the wrist comp looked up sharply. “Thrarm-Captain, the gas from the Raker: it’s pure hydrogen. Coming in at a rate of-”

But Thrarm-Captain wasn’t listening: he no longer needed to. He was too busy damning his own gullibility and rapping out orders: “Torch team, immediate return to our hull. Seal our hatches behind you. Bridge, jettison the emergency docking ring-”

The world seemed to tear itself apart around him. Before the torch team could exit the Raker’s shattered airlock, its inner door was blasted off its hinges with terrible force, killing two of the team outright, disabling a third.

Following that blast so quickly that it seemed to be part of the same event, flame came gushing into the companionways of Guardant Ancestor . The first roaring rush of white fire was the hydrogen combusting, knocking the kzinti down or spilling them sideways against walls and bulkheads. But hard on its heels came a thicker yellow-orange conflagration: clearly, a pressurized fuel-air explosive gas was being pumped in at immense pressure, right behind the hydrogen. The unit patches on the kzinti’s spacesuits began to burn. The battery of the beam-torch cooked off, detonating with a blue-white flash and a double-toned thunder-clap.

zh-Sensor’s voice was screaming reports as Thrarm-Captain picked himself up off the deck. “Launches from the Raker. More lifepods-no, not lifepods. Can’t be: they are maneuvering, moving straight toward our hull-”

Of course. The leaf-eaters are going to cut their way into my ship: why use an existing door when you can make your own? “zh-Sensor, engage the pods with all weapons; they are breaching craft.”

“Trying, Thrarm-Captain. They are too close; our weapons will not bear.”

That’s when the shooting started. The screaming buzz of a human heavy-coil gun was audible through Thrarm-Captain’s supposedly sound-proof faceplate, along with images of hellish carnage. The squad leader, who had been racing around the corner toward the airlock, caught a full flight of the electromagnetically propelled four-millimeter, tungsten-cored, steel needles. One moment he was there; the next, a vaguely bipedal mist of plasma and body parts was falling backward, a diffusing red smear. Following close behind him, a newly arrived junior squad leader was blown aside by just two of the projectiles, each one opening up a red crater on the left side of his torso.

Thrarm-Captain had his own handgun up as a reflective object rolled swiftly past the tee-intersection where the two kzinti had been riddled. Thrarm-Captain sent three fast rounds after it, may have hit the device, which, he now discerned, resembled a large metal ball propelled by four roller-rings on interpenetrated axes.

The full implications of what Thrarm-Captain was witnessing sunk in. The leaf-eaters were on his ship, with specialized combat ’bots. Somehow they knew what he was carrying, why his ship was built for defense not offense. It was impossible to conceive of how they had learned it, but they had, and their intent was now clear: they did not want to destroy his ship; they wanted to take it.

Unthinkable.

Thrarm-Captain had his mouth open to order his bridge crew to override all local controls and autoseal all bulkhead doors when there was a muffled blast from aft; the lights flickered and the faintly crackling carrier-tone of the command-channel died away. It came back after a moment, along with approximately half of the lights.

zh-Sensor’s words were tinny in the helmet’s compromised speakers: “Thrarm-Captain, power in Engineering is out. Apparently the humans have already sent some automated EMP bombs on ahead to-”

There was a dull explosion from the direction the robot-ball had gone-and zh-Sensor’s words died along with the rest of the lights. Leaf-eating spoor-spawn humans: they didn’t even have the courage to board themselves and-

Thrarm-Captain, changing his handgun’s now-malfunctioning power-pack, heard and then saw the approach of a new human robot: a floating oblong that bristled with weapons, one of which was clearly the hopper-fed coil-gun that had already killed two of his Heroes.

Screaming rage, seeing the spittle spray in a fine mist against the inner surface of his helmet’s face-plate, Thrarm-Captain seated the power pack, and brought up his weapon.

Which operated slightly longer than he did: the grav-chassised robot fired a stream of needles into the big kzin’s center of mass. Dead instantaneously, Thrarm-Captain’s finger remained frozen around the trigger: the gun fired a few rounds of futile defiance before falling to the deck in imitation of its wielder.

The autocutter-an expensive, purpose-built, one-use device derived from reverse-engineered kzin weapon technology-finished slicing into the hull of the kzin auxiliary cruiser that Lieutenant Commander Dieter Armbrust had determined was his op team’s target.