The marine Gunso commanding Team Three was waiting as Hadeishi kicked through a secondary interior door, just past the corridors servicing the cargo bay. “Shut this hatch,” the Chu-sa snapped. “We’ve artillery incoming.”
A pair of Team Four kashikan-hei slammed the portal closed, rotating the manual locking mechanism. “Report, sergeant.”
The marine grinned, his faceplate scored with black streaks. “ Kyo , this compartment’s secure and we’ve punched through to the shipcore along the immediate axis. Cargo elevators are knocked out, as is the tube car system. There’s atmosphere in most compartments, but not all. We blew out a set of blast doors at frame three and I’ve got the combat team pushing downdeck towards frame four-”
At that moment, the ship groaned and everything shuddered. The overheads flickered, shading from a Khaid-friendly bright white to a more normal yellow tone, then popped back. The alarms, which had been blaring since Mitsuharu had entered the primary hull, shifted tone-now they squealed like a pierced bladderfish.
“We’re hit!” The Gunso stared at the ceiling. “Sounded like a bomb-pod going off at short range.”
Hadeishi shook his head, starting to grin ferally. “The freighter’s lit off her maneuver drives. I doubt she’ll punch through the shipskin, but we need to abandon this corridor. Move everyone downdeck towards the engineering ring. That’s where we’ll settle this.”
Then he-and the others-were thrown violently to one side as the light cruiser went into some violent evolution and the g-decking on their whole ring fluctuated. Hadeishi hit the wall hard, feeling chitin splinter, and then bounced back as the decking failed entirely. He tucked in tight, getting his feet under before hitting the far wall. The marine had done the same. One of the kashikan-hei was floating limp, his faceplate filled with crimson bubbles.
“Move!” Mitsuharu pulled himself along the guiderail set into the wall, heading downdeck as fast as he could. The Gunso followed with the other kashikan-hei, the two men dragging a spool of comm-wire and a repeater with them. The hammering roar of shipguns swelled in on the radio feed, and from the sound of his team commanders shouting, the Chu-sa guessed the Khaid on board were counterattacking along the shipcore.
Fifteen minutes later, Hadeishi swung himself through a jagged hole hacked from a sidewall and into the engineering station at frame four. The room, controlling the cruiser’s dorsal power mains and shipskin sensor nodes, was tucked in behind a thermocouple relay and the motors for a pair of the big cargo elevators. Dead Khaid were webbed to one of the walls, and everything was scorched by plasma-cutter backwash.
Lovelace had found the main console, but she was engaged in a furious shouting match with one of the engineers when Mitsuharu reached her.
“ Kyo,” the Kikan-shi pleaded, turning towards him, “she’s going to get us all killed-she wants to-”
Hadeishi stopped the engineer with a cold glance. His face was rigid when he turned to the comm officer. “We’re four minutes behind schedule and you’ve already been here at least that long. What’s wrong?”
“This idiot,” Lovelace spat, wrenching her field comp from the Kikan-shi ’s hands. “Is trying to convince me we can crack the authorization codes for the shipnet interface by guessing them with something he’s hacked together on his hand-comp.”
“We don’t have time. Give me that cutter.” Hadeishi hooked one boot under the console, took the proffered plasma cutter-a small one, not the big industrial version they’d used on the wall-and sliced open the paneling directly under the display panel. “There are thirty-six billion combinations allowed in the authorization interface of a Spear -class cruiser, Engineer. There’s a lockout after fifteen tries in the base software-and we don’t have time to work around that.” He shoved aside a handful of hardwired data threads, and found-by feel-a comm node nestled behind them in the kind of socket that Defense Consortium salesmen liked to say was “easy to service, but hard to dislodge accidentally.”
“ Sho-i, you ready up there?” Mitsuharu plucked a multitool from his belt and wiggled half his shoulder into the panel.
“Ready, Chu-sa.” Lovelace’s voice was tight and trembling on the edge of open panic. “Are you really sure-”
“It worked before,” Mitsuharu said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. At the academy, on a different class of training cruiser-but from the same manufacturing yard and design shop-if memory serves. “Shorting the shipnet relay for this compartment-now.” He jammed the tool’s screwdriver into the node’s service socket and twisted to the right, grinding his wrist against the bundle of data threads. There was a sharp, bright flash and he felt his glove spark. “Done!”
The lights went out. There were a series of explosions very close by, followed by the high-pitched whine of shipguns on full automatic opening up. I didn’t mean to do that.
“They’re in the corridor,” barked the Gunso on the team radio. “Power’s down in the whole compartment!”
“Hachiman’s spear, they’ve cut the mains!” Hadeishi popped up from under the console, finding the room had cleared save for Sho-i Lovelace, who was staring at him with wide eyes. The engineering panel was dead, along with the overheads and everything else in the room save one emergency light which had flickered on to shed a feeble reddish glow.
“No power,” she bleated, pointing at the lightless displays.
Mitsuharu glared around the room, and then caught sight of her field comp, which was still humming away. “Powercell-pull the powercells from everything you’ve got. Move!”
Lovelace’s face cleared and she tore open the satchel, dragging out two Fleet-standard cells, just like the ones that ran her comp. “Here-and I’ve an adapter!”
Hadeishi was back under the panel, one ear listening to the scrum in the hallway, with both cells in his hands and the adapter wrapped around one wrist. The choonk of a grenade launcher punched through all the other noise and he hooked an arm out, grabbing the Sho-i by the foot. “Down!” She yelped, pitching over backward, just as the doorway billowed with smoke, shrapnel, and the whine of flechettes. Two sharp booms followed, and then the marine Gunso ducked back in.
“They’re coming again, Chu-sa -I can hear ’em howling up past the bathrooms at that junction.”
“One minute,” Hadeishi replied. “Jacking power to the console-now.”
Lovelace rose up enough to see the display, watching as the interface flickered to life. An unfamiliar set of v-panes unfolded, filled with the tight columns of technical Khadesh, but the arrangement was familiar enough, and some of the icons were still Fleet standard issue. “Panel’s coming up; switching to maintenance-”
Under the console, Hadeishi rotated the comm node to face him and saw the main power feed was still in place. Gingerly-there was no telling if the Khaid up on Command would decide to flip the mains back on-he levered the connector out. “Node is dead, no power!”
“I’m in maintenance mode on the console, Chu-sa. Overwriting the diagnostics suite now.”
Lovelace’s field comp, plugged socket-to-socket into the sub-comp running the console itself, chuckled and whirred for approximately four seconds, reloading the tools, interface image, and ’net matrix which ran the display itself. All of the v-panes went blank for an instant, and then reappeared, now showing the Fleet-standard interface.
“We’re live,” Lovelace said, keying a blur of commands with a stylus in either hand.
The Gunso at the door caught Hadeishi’s eye, signing They’re coming.