The captain turned to his comm officer. “Any signals coming out of her?”
“No Sir, not a peep. But I’ve only got the local array to work with, so I’m not a hundred percent sure about that. If they used a tight-beam, I doubt I’d see it.”
“Could she be playing possum, luring us into a trap?” This time his question was directed back to Commander Montero.
“It is possible, but doubtful. She’s pretty busted up. Most of her aft section is open to space.”
“He’s right sir,” the sensor operator added. “In fact, the only pressurized compartments I’m seeing are engineering and her Bridge. Pretty much everything else is in vacuum.”
The captain thought about it for a moment. His first instinct was to stand off and pulverize her with his eleven remaining rail guns. But there was a good chance that there was some valuable intelligence on that ship, maybe even some technology that might come in useful. No one had ever captured a Jung ship before.
“It is a risk,” the captain admitted to his XO. “But I think it’s worth it.” He looked to his second in command for confirmation.
“Agreed,” the commander said.
“Very well.” The captain sat back down in his command chair. “Take us in, Lieutenant. Slow and easy. Roll us over and park us directly above her topsides, roof-to-roof. Since we don’t have any shuttles, they’ll have to do this the hard way.”
“Yes Sir,” Nathan answered as he began rolling the ship. They had already decelerated and had been slowly coasting towards the disabled ship for the last few minutes.
“XO, let’s keep all guns trained on her, just in case.”
“Already done, Sir.”
The two boarding teams walked out onto the flight deck. Wearing armored combat EVA suits, each of them carried a small close-quarters weapon attached with quick-connect fittings to the chest plates of their suits. The flight deck’s gravity plating was only one quarter of Earth norm, so carrying their transfer packs out across the deck onto the open landing apron was easy.
Jessica looked up as she stepped onto the apron. Directly above her was the crippled Jung patrol ship. It was only about half as big as the Aurora. It was badly damaged and she could see several openings in her hull through which they could probably gain access. But her rail gun turrets still looked operable, which made Jessica a little nervous.
“This is so fuckin’ cool!” her partner, Ensign Enrique Mendez exclaimed.
“You can say that again,” she agreed. Jessica knelt down and secured a heavy transfer line to the deck, setting the carefully coiled cable neatly down next to her.
“I sure don’t remember this scenario in training, huh Jess?”
“Me neither.”
“Cut the chatter,” her team leader ordered. “Mount up and let’s get this show on the road. We go across as one, then split up after we reach the target vessel. Alpha goes forward and Bravo goes aft.”
Each group lined up in pairs. One of them held the transfer pack in front of them, the other latched onto the first one’s back. With a blast of the maneuvering jets in the transfer pack, each pair lifted off the landing apron of the Aurora and began their ascent to the roof of the Jung ship. It was slow going, as they didn’t want to slam into the other ship at breakneck speeds.
Jessica and Enrique were the last to leave. Enrique operated the transfer pack, with Jessica attached to his back-one hand on her weapon with it pointed straight ahead, and the other hand on the free end of the transfer line she had attached to the deck. The transfer packs had just enough thrust to get them over to the enemy ship, so the transfer line would be their only way back to the Aurora.
Jessica kept her eyes forward, looking for any signs of a hostile threat as they coasted toward the Jung ship. It was a rather ugly looking vessel, dirty and not well maintained she thought. It looked more like what she thought a space pirates’ ship might look like, if such a thing actually existed.
“Approaching the vessel now, Sir,” the report came over the comm.
The main screen was displaying the view from a camera built into the top of the Aurora just forward of her flight deck. It gave them a clear view of the boarding team as they made their way across the void between the two ships.
Nathan was amazed as he watched the spec-ops teams floating across in pairs, not understanding how anyone could do something like that, let alone want to do it. Spec-ops had a reputation back on Earth. ‘Anything, anytime, anywhere.’ Apparently they had meant it.
“Any change in that ship’s status?” the captain asked.
“No sir,” the sensor operator assured him. “She’s still at minimal power.”
The inside of the Jung ship was dark, with only dim emergency lighting in operation. There appeared to be only a single battery powered light in each section, which seemed hardly enough for the job. It seemed a little odd to Jessica, since you could read in the emergency lighting in the Aurora.
Jessica’s team had gone aft toward engineering, while Alpha team headed forward to capture the bridge. There was no gravity functioning on board, although she could tell by the design of the ship and the floating debris that the ship was equipped with artificial gravity, it just wasn’t working right now.
As they floated through the corridors, the closest thing they found to a crew were dead bodies floating about. But there were very few of them, and Jessica surmised that the sudden decompression probably sucked many of the ship’s crew out into space. That was fine with her, as it meant fewer Jungs with guns.
They were forced to use the maneuvering jets built-into their suits, as there was little to grab onto and the deck didn’t seem to have enough metal in it to use the magnets built into their boots. Jessica tried to use her hands when she could, hoping to save as much of her limited suit thrusters as possible in case she needed them later.
Luckily it had not been far from their entry point to the engineering section of the smaller ship, and a few minutes later they reached the access hatch to engineering.
“We’re taking fire!” came a voice over her comm-set. “Repeat, Alpha team is taking fire!”
Jessica looked to her team leader for orders.
“You know the rules, Nash,” he warned. “They have their job, we have ours.”
She watched as her partner placed the demo charges on the hatch, taking a safe position just around the corner. After he finished placing the charges, he moved around the corner with her before reporting.
“Charges are set LT.”
“Blow it.”
“Fire in the hole,” he announced.
There was a flash of light, but no sound since they were in a vacuum. Hundreds of pieces of metal shrapnel flew past them. After waiting a moment, Enrique peaked his head around the corner to take a look. The corridor was full of smoke, but there was light shining through the smoke which he was sure was coming from the open hatchway into Engineering.
“We’ve got a hole,” Enrique reported.
The team leader and his partner took up positions on either side of the door. They each had to keep one hand on the hatch ring in order to keep from floating freely in the zero gravity of the hallway.
The lieutenant took a small marker stick from his utility pouch and tossed it through the hatch. As it floated across the threshold, it suddenly dropped to the floor.
“There’s gravity in there,” he reported. He pulled out his fiber optic camera and carefully snaked the lens around the edge of the hatch to look inside. On the far side of the room, he could see a man in a pressure suit, frantically doing something at a control console. He couldn’t see a weapon on him.
“I’ve got one bad guy, in a pressure suit, doing something at a console on the left. I can’t tell if he’s armed.”
Suddenly, his partner stuck his weapon through the hatchway and opened fire. Immediately, two blue-white blasts of energy were fired at the hatch from inside. The first one bounced off the wall inside, but the second one came through the hatch, catching the over enthusiastic ensign in the shoulder, instantly burning a hole through his armor, suit, and shoulder. He screamed in pain as the upper half of his suit suddenly depressurized, killing him a moment later.