Lukyan snatched up Olya’s carbine and swung himself up against a wall behind a support stanchion. Using the small rifle as a large pistol he started laying down suppressing fire, giving the rest of the Novgorods a chance to scuttle out of the lift and to the cover of the nearest console stations.
Katya slid frantically across the floor until she reached cover. Petrov ducked down beside her, checking the charge left in the pistol.
“Not going quite to plan, lieutenant,” said Katya as maser bolts cracked overhead. She wondered at her own apparent unconcern, as if they were playing a game. Maybe she couldn’t take this seriously because she still wasn’t quite used to the idea of people trying to kill her. It was a good state of mind, she decided. If she really accepted the danger she was in, she might never move again.
“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, Ms Kuriakova,” he replied, ejecting the pistol’s depleted cell and replacing it with a new one, fresh from the manufacturer’s wrapper. Katya was going to ask him where he’d got it and the decided that she didn’t care very much under the circumstances.
She looked over at Lukyan who was pushing himself as small as he could go behind the stanchion as a hail of maser bolts cracked and hissed off the metal. He saw her and shrugged, out of ideas himself. Katya smiled as bravely as she could manage and looked around. This was crazy, she concluded. There were nine of them altogether with only two guns between them. They should have had a contingency plan, but who could have guessed that they were heading into a trap? They weren’t going to be able to shoot their way out of this. Either they surrendered or… what?
Katya wished that Kane was there with them; they could definitely have done with his infuriating habit of thinking off at tangents, seeing possibilities beyond the obvious. She made a mental effort and imagined him there, pinned down with the rest of them, and then she imagined what he might do, what ideas he might have.
He’d say that not only their plan, but their plan’s objectives were no longer possible. Specifically the secondary objective of taking the bridge. That simply was not going to happen with them pinned down by any number of troopers…
“Give it up, Petrov!” shouted a familiar voice. “Don’t get anybody else killed for no reason!”
…and the Chertovka. They were caught between the She-Devil and the deep black sea. But the primary aim had always been launching the attack on the Leviathan and perhaps that, at least, was still possible. Whatever they did, they had better do it quickly; the alarms had been blaring for the last minute and the rest of the Novgorods would already be on the way to capture a boat. They’d fight to the last ensign to hold it in the hope that Petrov’s party would be joining them. For their sakes as much as their own, they had to get out of there.
“How do you think they knew we were coming here, Petrov?” Katya asked.
He took a moment to fire a couple of blind shots over the edge of the console they were cowering behind before replying. “Monitoring the lift system, they must have been. Looks like they did find we’d gone after all, but just played it quiet.”
“So when they realised the lift was coming here, they just grabbed what troopers they could? That’s what I thought, too.”
Petrov nodded. “If they’d had more warning they’d have set up a crossfire across the lift door. We’d all be dead or recaptured by now.” He looked at her seriously. “What’s your point?”
“My point,” she swivelled onto her knees and slowly poked her head up as far as she dared. The rake of the console’s controls and the bulk of its monitor bank hid her from the trooper’s guns but allowed her to examine what was there. Typical Conclave interface and, as the Conclave’s supplied everybody else, that meant she was very familiar with the console’s operation. “My point is that we don’t need to take the bridge to open fire on the Leviathan.”
She accessed the console and reconfigured it to the targeting protocols. The fire controls were locked, but only at a low level to prevent accidental launch. It took her less than a minute to bypass them.
The firing had trickled to a halt for lack of targets. “Petrov!” called Tasya again. “You’re just delaying the inevitable. Your situation is hopeless. Surrender now and we’ll go easy on you and your people.”
Petrov was watching Katya with open admiration, not so much for her ability with the controls as thinking of doing this in the middle of a fire fight in the first place. “Yes, okay,” he called back vaguely, “I’ll think about it. Give us a minute.”
On the main holographic display, the Leviathan still surged through the waves towards FP-1. Suddenly a large red targeting reticle appeared framing the Leviathan. “Target acquired,” a computer announced.
Immediately there was pandemonium amongst the Yagizban. “What is going on?” demanded a voice Katya recognised as Major Moltsyn. “What the thunder is going on?”
“They’ve accessed the weapons systems, you idiot!” That was Tasya. “You! Lock them out!”
I don’t think so, thought Katya. She’d already prioritised her console and forced a system lockdown across the weapons multi-user protocols.
“I… I can’t, colonel,” she heard. “They’ve locked us out!”
Tasya again. Cold and very sincere. “If they fire, I will kill you.” Suddenly Katya understood why they called her the She-Devil. On her console, a series of options she didn’t understand came up. “What are lanterns?” she hissed at Petrov. “It says ‘Lanterns — 10%’ here.”
“Torpedoes set to constant active sonar. They don’t tend to last long but they light the target up like a phosphor worm for the rest of the torpedo spread. Set it to 20% of the spread — we want the Leviathan to know it’s being attacked.”
Katya quickly upped the ratio to twenty, clicked through the next couple of screens and was met with ‘Ready to fire — enter authorisation code.’
“Uh-oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘uh-oh’?” asked Petrov. He raised his head far enough to look at the screen. “Ah. Uh-oh.” He ducked back down again. “Listen to me, we’re not sunk yet. That’s not a security measure, it’s just another failsafe to make sure weapons aren’t fired accidentally. Go around it, through the system maintenance screens. Do you know how to get to those?”
“Are you kidding me?” said Katya, putting the request on hold and accessing the system maintenance screens. “Front end interfaces are for corridor rats. I can get around it.”
I think I can get around it, she added to herself. It didn’t appear that the Yagizban wanted to give her the chance. She was half aware of Petrov going flat on his belly and slithering off between the consoles before more of her attention was claimed by a new wave of maser bolts sizzling past her, cracking off bulkheads and supports. The attack came a moment later, troopers threading their way through the maze of consoles and abandoned seats at a run. Lukyan fired a scatter of shots into the middle of the Yagizban line causing a few troopers to dive for cover, but the ones close to the walls kept coming on. Then one right at the limit of the flank fell with a cry. Hardly had he vanished from sight behind a work station, than Petrov reared up, the fallen trooper’s assault maser blazing off shots in a wild suppression pattern. Caught unawares from the side, a couple of troopers were hit and fell wounded. The others took cover and returned fire, but Petrov had already vanished.