Thorarinn Gunnarsson - Battle of the Ring

Skerri remained silent, lacking a ready answer for that. His arguments were not going very well, so he finally admitted to himself that he was not going to convince this girl to surrender. Instead he now thought it best to allow her to conclude her business so that she would let him go in time to warn the ship about the damage she had done. He really was a trusting soul, and not particularly bright.

“You will be leaving when you finish here?” he asked guardedly.

“Of course. And you…” She paused to look at him. “I can’t take you with me, and I certainly can’t just let you go. I really cannot risk your getting free if I left you tied up somewhere, and you’ll be dead soon enough anyway.”

She looked over at Bill, and Skerri knew that she meant to have the renegade sentry shoot him. Lenna turned back to her work unconcerned, but he watched the motionless sentry. After a moment the machine moved for the first time since they had arrived, turning its head to look out the door.

“The lift door just opened,” Bill reported. “I also hear a sentry approaching from the other direction.”

“Check it out, Bill,” Lenna told him. “I can keep an eye on Captain Dauntless. I’ll blow his head off if he makes a sound.”

Although she had been addressing the sentry, Lieutenant Skerri was quite aware that her final statement had been for his benefit. Nor did he doubt that she meant it, and he had nothing to lose except a couple of minutes off a severely limited life expectancy. As soon as Lenna returned to her work of securing the outer access panel, he launched himself directly at her. She saw him coming at the very last moment and threw herself well to one side, unfortunately in the opposite direction of the gun that she had laid handy on top of the launch tube. Skerri knocked the gun off the top of the tube as he landed against it, and it disappeared into the shadows beyond.

The two combatants came off the floor at the same time, ready for battle. Lenna had three distinct advantages: she was much stronger, quicker, and Skerri was under the mistaken impression that both of those advantages were his. She was more than a match for him, at least until he snatched up the long-handled socket wrench. That put her on the defensive from the start.

Skerri advanced menacingly, swinging the wrench in a wide horizontal sweep as if it were a club or battleax. Lenna avoided it easily, but his tactic was simple; each swing drove her half a meter toward the wall at her back. After the second attempt she followed his swings with a quick rabbit punch to the jaw. Skerri endured three of these dizzying punches before changing his tactics, lifting his swing high enough to make her duck. While bent over, she delivered one more vicious punch to his stomach, ducked under his arm, and followed with a joint-snapping two-fisted thump in the middle of his back. The combination so thoroughly knocked the wind out of him that he nearly passed out and was forced to retreat.

Skerri returned to the battle with a little more respect for his opponent. He held the wrench in one hand, leaving him freer to hit and kick. That helped a bit; he did not score any hits on Lenna, but at least she was scoring fewer hits on him. But Skerri was clearly on the defensive, and Lenna knew that she only had to bide her time until Bill returned.

After a minute of this a sentry ambled into the chamber and paused just inside the door. Lenna glanced over her shoulder and realized that this was not Bill. There was no heavy rifle strapped over his left shoulder. While Bill had been checking the lift, the second sentry had heard the sounds of the fight and hurried to investigate. She was also trapped with Skerri in front and the hostile sentry behind. Then she realized that it was confused by the sight of two Union officers. Skerri was just as quick to recognize the problem.

“I am Lieutenant Captain Denas Skerri,” he stated authoritatively. “This is an imposter. Shoot to kill!”

The machine did not respond immediately; perhaps it was checking his visual identification against the file to confirm his claim. Lenna turned back to him and did her best to kick his balls off, then slipped behind him to put his bent form between herself and the sentry. Skerri recovered with surprising speed, turning to face her. Lenna drew back and launched herself at him, kicking with all her strength into the very center of his chest. Skerri was thrown backward, actually leaving the ground for most of his three-meter flight. He crashed back-first into the front of the sentry’s head, the pencil-thin barrels of its two smaller guns driving ten centimeters into his back. But he was dead already, his chest crushed by her kick.

Lenna had fallen sprawling to the ground, and she rolled to one side as bolts from the sentry’s larger cannons deflected off the floor where she had been. It shook its head violently to free itself of the burden of the body penned there. Lenna had hoped to slip around behind it, but now she was hopelessly trapped between the two launch tubes. The sentry tracked her darting movements with its head until it had her, and fired.

The protective flarings on both of the sentry’s forward guns were blocked with thick blood, and the bolts discharged within the focusing lenses before they could cut through those barriers, causing the head of the unfortunate machine to explode. However, as Velmeran had discovered a couple of years before, that was only a minor complication to the normal function of a sentry. The headless machine staggered blindly as it sought its prey by the infrared scanners on its chest.

Lenna dived over the top of the launch tube, using that for shelter as she searched for her gun. The sentry fired two short bursts over her head as it continued to seek her. Then Bill was there, ramming the stricken sentry from behind to knock it off balance before discharging a round of bolts into its vulnerable lower hull. Lenna waited for the shooting to stop before she peered cautiously over the top of the tube.

“Thank you, Bill. Nice work,” she said, climbing over the protective barrier. Then she saw the broken body of Lieutenant Skerri where it had been tossed aside. For a moment she allowed herself the privilege of turning pale, just as she had those times in the chilly streets of Kallenes. Half of it was from the sudden awareness that she had killed this man herself, half from the realization that it had nearly been herself. For a moment she wanted to sit down and cry, but this was hardly the time or place. You wanted to be a Starwolf, Miss Makayen, and so you are, she reminded herself. This is just the ugly part of the business.

“They are dead,” Bill said helpfully, no doubt meaning to be reassuring.

“Sure, and that’s what bothers me about it,” Lenna said. “I’d better seal this up to make sure that it works the way we want, then we’ll be on our way. Think you can get us back to the airlock where we first met?”

“Yes, that is a simple matter.”

“Don here,” Commander Trace responded, speaking into his com unit as he sat down wearily on the step. “Is that you, Kea?”

“Yes, Commander. Fifty minutes from your mark.”

Donalt Trace sighed and nodded in dismal agreement to no one in particular. “Wait five more minutes and order a general evacuation from the power core. Seal up the core completely, from one end of the ship to the other. We haven’t found the slightest hint of tampering, much less a bomb. No wonder he was so sure of himself.”

He paused a moment to watch the workers swarming over the surface of the power core, surrounding it in a ring that moved slowly forward. There were fifty live workers and twice as many automatons. In the last three-quarters of an hour they had removed nearly two thousand access panels.