Jack Campbell - Invincible

Spotting thumbnails where activity seemed to be going on, he brought those to the fore, seeing views from the combat armor of Marines actually on the superbattleship’s hull. The tags on the views identified them as combat engineers, and as Geary watched he saw them placing breaching charges to blow open one of the big hatches like the one he had seen earlier.

The view shifted rapidly as the Marines huddled by the hull, then shook as directional charges went off, blowing out portions of the hatch, the shock of the explosions transmitting through the hull to rattle the Marines clinging to it.

The view swayed again dizzily as the combat engineers swung back to the hatch, followed by curses over the comm circuits. “We didn’t get through!” “How thick is this stuff?”

Then came orders from Carabali, sounding in every combat engineer’s battle armor. “Double up the breaching charges.”

The Marine engineers moved quickly, not really needing the “Move it!” encouragement from their squad leaders as they rigged breaching charges in tandem to get through the armor protecting the superbattleship. The delay had thrown off the shuttles, which were clustering near the superbattleship without anyplace to drop off their Marines. Views jumped again as the combat engineers put distance between themselves and the breaching charges. “Fire in the hole!”

How old was that warning, and what had it originally referred to? Geary wondered. Maybe it had once meant someone had physically lit a fuse with an open flame. Now it just warned of an explosion soon to come.

The view shook again, prolonged this time. Marines moved with cries of triumph to holes spearing through the armored hatch. “Five more! Here and here! That’ll break this section free. Go!”

Geary scanned the other windows, seeing similar activity under way at every point where the Marines were trying to blast their way inside the superbattleship. One by one, the breaching teams were creating holes large enough for Marines to pull themselves inside.

He called up a different window, this one showing the view from a Marine who had made it inside a similar cargo-hatch area. There were no lights, just a dark void. “No gravity inside. It’s broke, or they shut it off.” Moving cautiously, the Marine moved to one side as more Marines entered, their infrared-beam lights providing ghostly images of a large compartment that bore some resemblance to that on a human ship. But then, why wouldn’t it? The requirements for moving cargo were the same no matter what creature was doing the job.

“No internal gravity?” Geary heard General Charban comment behind him. “Marines train for that, don’t they?”

“That’s right,” Desjani replied. “They prefer to fight with a gravity field, but they can handle zero g.” She sounded proud of that, that the Marines could deal with something ground forces weren’t trained to handle. Geary had heard her bemoan Marine behavior and mind-sets more than once among fleet officers, but when it came to outsiders like ground forces and aerospace defense, the fleet and the Marines suddenly became brothers and sisters in arms.

The Marines whom Geary had focused on were moving quickly but cautiously to check out the compartment, their heads-up displays highlighting anything that looked unusual or suspicious. In this case, surrounded on the bulkheads and overhead by alien devices of strange design even if they probably fulfilled familiar functions, the heads-ups were keying on almost everything that wasn’t flat bulkhead. In some cases, even seemingly unadorned sections of the walls, overhead, and deck had something about them that made the sensors in the Marine combat armor unhappy.

“Pressure switches?” one of the Marines in the unit Geary was zoomed in on speculated.

“Maybe,” his sergeant replied. “Maybe just cargo-tracking stuff. But maybe not. Keep off ’em.”

“What the hell is this?”

“If you don’t know, don’t touch it ! Stop playing tourists and find the air locks and their controls!”

Geary shifted from unit to unit, seeing pretty much the same thing everywhere. Units inside the compartments the combat engineers had breached, moving in zero g as they tried to find all of the hatches leading farther into the enemy ship. “Found one,” a Marine cried. “Are these the controls? They’re set real low, almost on the deck.”

“Duh, brain-dead. These guys are short, remember?”

“Shut up,” their corporal said. “Hey, Sarge, this looks like it. Some sort of knife switch instead of a button, though.”

“Lieutenant?”

“Wait. Okay, Sergeant. The captain says open it up, but be ready for them to be on the other side. Weapons free.”

“Got it. Cover the hatch, you slugs. Flip the switch, Kezar.”

Geary waited, watching, as Corporal Kezar swung the knife switch upward.

And waited.

“Nothing’s happening, Sarge.”

“I can see that. Lieutenant?”

“None of the switches are opening hatches, Sergeant. Get your hacker to work.”

“Cortez! Get that thing open.”

Another Marine huddled by the switch, popping the cover with some difficulty and peering inside. Geary quickly changed views to see what Private Cortez saw, but he couldn’t make out what he was seeing.

The lieutenant’s voice came on again. “What’s the word? Can you override the controls?”

“I can’t even identify the controls!” Private Cortez protested. “This box looks like it oughta be them…”

“Then find the input, find some wires—”

“Lieutenant, there ain’t no input that I can see except this swing switch, and there ain’t no wires in this thing. There’s just some kind of mesh in… what is that gunk? Gel or something.”

“You can’t— What’s—” The lieutenant must also have been viewing what Cortez and Geary were both looking at. “How the hell does that stuff work?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant! All I do know is I can’t hack something that doesn’t work like anything we’ve got!”

Similar conversations were happening in Marine units at every penetration. “Captain, we’re going to have to blow the air locks,” the lieutenant reported after huddling with his sergeant.

“Are the outer hull penetrations blocked?”

“Sir, I don’t know, but we can operate in vacuum fine—”

“Our orders are to take everything inside this ship as intact as possible, and there are a lot of things that don’t handle vacuum as well as our combat armor,” the captain said. “Hold on. Colonel, we need to know if the hull penetrations in this area have been sealed.”

“Yuhas! We need a green light to blow the locks!”

Almost a minute passed as more and more Marines called up the chain of command for approval to blow open pathways into the ship.

“Colonel Yuhas reports his combat engineers say we’re good to go,” the relieved word finally came down the chain of command. “Blow the bulkheads, not the air locks. We don’t know how they’re sealed or locked. That’s from brigade command. Everybody blow your way inside but avoid going straight through air locks. We’re way behind on movement. Get inside that thing.”

“What’s going on?” Desjani asked.

“They’re blowing internal bulkheads now to get inside,” Geary told her.

“That’s why I saw them plugging holes and rigging emergency air locks on the outside of the hull? Have they seen any Kicks yet?”

“No.” He watched a hundred thumbnail views at once as Marines blasted their way through bulkheads and into passageways and other compartments. “Empty.”

Everywhere the Marines were entering, the superbattleship seemed to be vacant of any crew. The Marines moved in rushes down passageways that weren’t as wide or tall as those on human ships but were still large enough to manage a couple of Marines abreast. Smaller cross-corridors intersected the large passageways in what seemed to be a regular enough grid arrangement, similar to those used by humans. As in human ships, conduits holding wiring and ducts carrying air festooned the overhead, offering grips to the Marines as they pulled themselves along, swimming through zero g. As they advanced, the Marines spread out, penetrating deeper into the ship as well as to each side and up and down through the decks.