A wave of relief and utter fatigue washed over Grant as he followed Peled out the door. Behind him he could hear Cookie: “…nasty motherfuckers…you’ll need grenades, as many as you have. And they’ve got these fucking swords…”
In contrast to Commander Peled’s urbane dignity, Captain Gur was a short, barrel chested man who looked like he’d been in his share of barroom brawls. His nose had been broken more than once and there was a white scar above his eyebrow that stood in sharp relief to his swarthy complexion. He had hard, shrewd eyes that only a day before would have made Grant nervous.
“Well, Lieutenant,” Gur said coldly. “We are in the middle of a battle in which we are getting our asses kicked. The flag ship of the Victorian task force, led by your father, is sitting in space with its thumb up its ass, and you just dropped by in an escape pod. Now would you be so kind, Lieutenant, as to tell me just what the fuck is going on?”
Grant had to fight the fatigue that wrapped his head in wool and dulled his mind. Part of him wanted to laugh; part of him feared he was going to cry. Without asking the Captain’s permission, he collapsed into a chair and scrubbed his face with his hands. Gur’s face flushed at what he took to be a sign of disrespect.
“I asked you a question, Lieutenant!” he snapped.
Grant nodded wearily. “I am trying to think of a way to explain it that you will understand, sir.”
“Well think fast, mister, because I am just a heartbeat away from having you tossed out the airlock for cowardness and desertion in the face of the enemy,” Gur replied angrily, his chin thrust out and his eyes flashing.
Grant’s face flushed with anger. “Then here it is, Captain. Our fleet was ambushed by a combined force of Dominion and Tilleke ships. Those Duck ships we rescued were a set up. It was a ploy to get them into our formation where they could hurt us once the shooting started. The London was boarded by a hundred or more commandos and is now in enemy hands. And right now, Captain, there are two enemy ships just a few miles away from you. If I’m right, and I know I am right,” Grant said flatly, “a bunch of very bad-ass Tilleke commandos are going to board the Yorkshire in the next few minutes and slaughter every one of you.”
“We don’t have any ships that close on our sensors, Lieutenant. How do you explain that?” Gur demanded.
“I don’t know, sir. But I do know the Tilleke put at a least a company’s worth of troops on the London and we never had a clue. I was sitting right on the bridge; we never saw it coming.”
Commander Peled cleared his throat. “Ah, Captain, the Lieutenant here had a very convincing corpse on the escape pod with him. Commando style battle gear, but most definitely not a Victorian Royal Marine.”
Gur raised an eyebrow in question. Peled nodded. “I am having arms distributed now, sir.”
Grant never felt so frustrated in his life. He knew what was coming, just not what to do about it. He rubbed his eyes. He could hear Emily Tuttle’s voice: I tried to figure out what Grant would want to do, and how Hiram would do it. So, first things first.
“Sir, they hit us first in the Engineering Room.”
“How did they get to Engineering without passing through other ship spaces?” Gur snarled.
Grant shook his head. “I have no idea, sir, but our Mildred did not give us any warning of hull breaches.”
Commander Peled’s normal look of casual indifference was replaced by a sudden look of alarm. “Sir, we’ve heard reports for years that the Tilleke were researching teleportation.”
“Teleportation is a fairy tale!” Gur shot back. “Our best scientists have spent years poking at it and have gotten nowhere.”
“I don’t know how they got on board, but they did,” Grant said softly. “We had fifty Marines on the London, and they overwhelmed us. The Savak are good, and there are a lot of them. You’ve got what, twenty, thirty Marines for the entire ship?” Gur nodded. “We need something better than shooting at them, Captain. If they are transporting aboard, I’ve got another idea.”
The Tilleke krait hovered like a shadow ten miles from the Yorkshire. It was in full stealth mode, with fewer emissions than the ambient space around it. With a nano-technology matte finish that absorbed light, baffles that dispersed its heat signature and running without either radio noise or active sensors, it could only be detected if someone happened to look right at it. The First Sister Pilot studied her sensors. The enemy vessel loomed before them. If all was well, there was another Krait just to its stern. She checked the computer display. Ten seconds more, then eighty of the Emperor’s Imperial Guard would beam aboard and another enemy ship would be theirs.
The timer chimed. She turned to her brothers. “Remember your duty! Glory to the Emperor!” She activated the transporter. Snow began to fall.
“Energy spike!” the Sensors Officer on the Yorkshire yelled. “No, two spikes. One ten miles to port and one three miles behind us. There was nothing there a minute ago, now something big just flared up!”
“Mark those locations,” Gur ordered. He switched to ship broadcast mode. “This is the Captain. Intruder alert! Stay in your assigned posts! Stay alert! Captain, out.” They had been able to arm only one in every five crewmen, and they hadn’t had time to properly group together their new “militia,” as Benny Peled had sardonically labeled them. Too thin on the ground, he fretted.
Beside him, Grant hunched over the video display, which showed a perfectly empty Engineering Deck. Other video feeds showed the docking bay, the first, second and third cargo bays and the ship’s auditorium — anyplace with enough room to transport a couple of dozen armed soldiers who didn’t want to materialize in the middle of a bulkhead. He hunched his shoulders. Cookie was down there, waiting in a corridor just outside the Engineering Deck with fifteen of the Yorkshire’s precious Marines, all of them swathed in ballistic armor and helmets, Bullpups and blasters fully charged.
Come on, he thought irritably, where the hell are you?
Then the video feed from Engineering suddenly sparkled as a swirl of something white — snow? — popped into existence. The snow blew and gusted in a circle, dropping visibility to just a few feet, and then there were ten armed men standing in what had been an empty room. Grant stole a look at the computer. From nothing to full materialization in nine seconds. “Bugger me,” he whispered, awe-struck. “They really can do it. They really can do it.” We need to get one of those little ships of theirs, he thought.
He had been so focused on Engineering that he only now realized the Savak had transported to the auditorium and the second cargo bay as well.
“Chief, vent the Engineering Deck, auditorium and Cargo Hold Two.”
He turned to Captain Gur. “Captain, I would advise that you now turn on your navigation lights and set them to blink mode.” He smiled grimly. “Welcome to the Tilleke navy, Captain.”
Gur gave a shark’s grin, all white teeth and menace. The video screens showed the Savak beating frantically at hatchways, and then slowly collapsing as their air was vented to space. One fell to his knees, shooting his rifle impotently again and again into the bulkhead until he pitched over and lay still. Gur nodded in satisfaction. “How many, Skiffington?”
“A total of thirty in these rooms, sir,” Grant replied. “Computer shows a total of fifty more scattered in smaller groups through fifteen other spaces. But they’re all locked down tight.” His face darkened. “Some of your crew were caught in there, Captain. I’m sorry.”