Christopher Nuttall - Democracy's Right

“Good,” he said. There wouldn’t even be any live feed from the shuttles. “Hold our position and stand by.”

There was nothing else he could do, but wait.

The great advantage of the Marine Goblin-class assault shuttle, as far as Colonel Neil Frandsen was concerned, was that it could pass for a Cloud-class heavy transport shuttle, even at close range. Its weapons were mounted on recessed platforms, allowing them to be concealed from suspicious eyes until it was far too late, while it could carry thirty armoured Marines into the heart of the enemy position. In this case, Neil knew, three shuttles were going to land on the General Montgomery .

He studied his HUD as he ran through the final checks of his armour and weapons. Commander — no, Captain now — Walker had been keen to avoid heavy casualties if possible, but Neil knew that it was quite possible that they would lose the entire team along with the superdreadnaught. It didn’t matter so much to him. After he’d been effectively cashiered for refusing orders to slaughter helpless captives, his life had been meaningless. Colin Walker had offered him a chance for redemption, both for himself and the Marine Corps. It said a great deal about how dissatisfaction that spread through the ranks that only a handful of his regiment had refused to join the rebellion.

“Ten seconds, sir,” the pilot said. The looming bulk of the superdreadnaught was growing rapidly through the forward portal. Neil activated his implant and linked into the shuttle’s sensors, checking out their target shuttlebay. There would be a welcoming committee for the high-value prisoners they were supposed to be carrying, but they would be lightly armed and properly unarmoured. The prisoners were supposed to be helpless, after all. “Nine… eight… seven…”

Neil felt a combat trance falling over him as the shuttle entered the shuttlebay, passing through the forcefield that kept the air within the bay. The shuttle’s sensors revealed a small group of armed men wearing the crimson colours of the Roosevelt Family, marking them out as Household Troops. His smile widened. Household Troops were good at looking pretty, but few of them had any real experience of actual fighting on the battlefield. They would be no match for his men.

“Weapons ready, sir,” the pilot said.

Neil nodded. The other advantage of the Goblin’s design was that all of the Marines could be ejected swiftly from the ship, making it impossible for the enemy to bottle them up inside and trap them — or eject the shuttle back into space.

“Fire,” he ordered.

Lieutenant Wagner watched as the three shuttles slowly lowered themselves onto the deck, their sleek forms obscured by the shimmering drive fields propelling them through space. He was rather surprised that the pilots had chosen to fly right into the shuttlebay, rather than use the starship’s tractor beams to land slowly and precisely, but Lady Roosevelt had ordered that they land as quickly as possible. Wagner had served the Roosevelt Family long enough to know that what Lady Roosevelt wanted, Lady Roosevelt got, at least as long as her subordinates wanted to keep their cushy jobs. The Household Troops knew better than to object. They could always be transferred to the Imperial Army and sent to serve on some godforsaken muddy ball at the edge of the Empire, where the only recreation was banging inbred girls and shooting pigeons.

The drive fields shimmered away to almost nothing and Wagner blinked in surprise. The shuttle seemed to be opening its hatches… no, it was opening shields protecting heavy weapons! For a second, he was frozen in place as the weapons revealed themselves, and then training took over and his hand raced towards the emergency button. It was too late. The heavy plasma cannons mounted on the Marine shuttle opened fire and Wagner’s body was vaporised, along with the men under his command. The Marines had taken the shuttlebay in the first second of the boarding mission.

Neil braced himself as he was catapulted out of the shuttle, his armour automatically compensating for the motion and bringing him down towards the deck. His HUD updated rapidly as the suit’s sensors started to monitor the ship’s internal status, noting the by-products of heavy plasma weapons being fired and the sudden dearth of any armed resistance. The charred bodies that were all that remained of the Household Troops could be safely ignored, so Neil led the first platoon in a charge towards the shuttlebay control compartment, where a uniformed crewman was staring at the Marines as if they were demons from hell. Even if he had reacted at once, it was already too late to seal the ship and vent the shuttlebay into space; the deployed Marines were already flowing into the ship. The plasma fire had disabled the inner hatches.

He crashed through the window and came down inside the control compartment. The crewman was still stunned, but Neil shot him anyway, using the stunner to render him unconscious. The man would be out of it for an hour, by which time the boarding action would have succeeded — or failed. He checked the updates from the other Marines as they flowed into the nearby compartments, stunning everyone they encountered. The great beauty of the stunners, at least in his opinion, was that they could — quite literally — shoot first and ask questions later. He triggered a specific command in his suit and extended a data line into the computers, accessing the shuttlebay’s primary monitoring system. If the superdreadnaught’s security team was on the ball, they should already be trying to lock the Marines out, seal off the entire section and trap the Marines until they could assemble the force to take them out. The feedback started at once, confirming his fears.

“Deal with it,” he ordered. One of the Marines — a communications tech — squatted down beside him and used her own suit to access the systems, overriding the main security codes and isolating the shuttlebay’s control systems. Neil had wondered if they would be able to take control of the entire datanet from the shuttlebay, but — not entirely to his surprise — the system was hard-isolated from the datanet. The Empire was understandably paranoid about computer security. “See if you can get me a live feed from the cameras.”

“The main system has been secured,” the tech said, slowly. Her voice was thoughtful. Like every Marine, she was a combatant first and a tech second, but she tended to resent her position. No Marine was expendable, yet she was less expendable than most, purely because of her advanced training. “The ship’s security system isn’t linked into this system.”

Neil nodded. It had been worth a try, even though he hadn’t expected success. “12th Platoon stays here and guards the shuttles,” he ordered. They’d planned the mission out in advance, but there was always room for improvising — after all, no battle plan survived contact with the enemy. “The rest of us will move to our assigned targets.”

He led the fire team out of the shuttlebay and headed down towards the hatch connecting the shuttlebay compartment to the rest of the ship. It would be easy to get lost inside the massive superdreadnaught, but his HUD constantly projected a map in front of his eyes. The hatch itself was computer-locked, yet — for safety reasons — it was actually quite easy to open it unless the inner system had been fused. It wouldn’t have mattered even if they had fused the inner systems; Neil would have brought up one of the heavy plasma cannons and blasted his way through the hatch. No one, not even the most paranoid designer, would put warship-grade armour on the inside of a starship.