"Wait!"
The word popped out of her as abruptly as a punch in the face, and Tschu paused, halfway out of his station chair. He and Hannah Segovia darted a look at each other, then turned back to Lauren with wary expressions.
"What is it?" Alf asked cautiously.
"Look at them!" Lauren jabbed a finger at the visual display which showed the oncoming Melconians.
"There are only four of the bastards, and they're moving straight along the passages towards Control."
"Yeah, there are only four of them," he agreed. "But they've got guns, and we don't. And like you say, they're headed straight this way."
"Sure they are," she agreed, and her lips drew back in a wolfish snarl. "But they're staying bunched up and following the bulkhead markers. Don't you see? Either they can read Standard English, or else their suit computers are translating for them, but they're coming straight down the pike. Which means we know where they're going to be when they cross Bravo-Four and head for the hatch, don't we."
"Well, yeah... ." he said slowly, but Lauren was no longer paying him any attention. She was busy giving very careful very explicit orders to the industrial module's simpleminded AI.
"We'll finish boarding the battalion in another twenty minutes, ma'am," Major Atwater told Maneka.
"Sorry we can't move any faster than that."
"Major, the fact that you can squeeze your people into the available space at all is remarkable,"
Maneka replied, taking pains to keep even the smallest hint of frustration out of her tone. Atwater was indeed doing remarkably well to be getting her people and their equipment aboard as quickly as she was, and Maneka knew her own observation about the available space was well taken. The automated depot, coupled with Lazarus' own bulk, had reduced the space which ought to have easily accommodated Atwater's five hundred militia men and women to claustrophobic dimensions. At least Maneka had offloaded the depot's spare parts and as much of the rest of the pod's cargo as possible, but the space reduction was still severe. They were fortunate that the battalion's heavy weapons could fit aboard standard heavy-lift cargo platforms. Five of them were tractor-locked to Lazarus' missile deck and the pod's flanks, which was strictly against The Book but let Maneka squeeze them aboard anyway.
"Let me know as soon as we can seal hatches, Major," she said.
"Affirmative, ma'am."
"Green board, ma'am!" Chief Harriman announced sharply.
"Thank God!" Lieutenant Jessica Stopford acknowledged, looking up from her own console, and carefully entered the necessary code before removing her thumb from the self-destruct button.
The Melconians had reached the final blast door before Engineering itself, and she had just committed her final distraction—a pair of cleaning machines—to slowing them down. By now, the Dog Boys had adjusted to her tricks, and they blew the automated mops to bits almost casually, but the delay had lasted just long enough.
"Up!" Ensign Younts announced, and Stopford looked over her shoulder at the ensign.
At the Skipper's insistence (which Stopford had thought was just a little paranoid of him at the time), everyone aboard Thermopylae had at least read the manuals on the powered armor. But Younts and Chief Harriman, both of whom had served in direct support of the Marines before their current assignment, were the only two members of the crew with anything approaching hands-on familiarity with the equipment.
Now they walked their powered armor massively across the forward power room's decking. The standard Marine-issue armor gleamed like black ice under the overhead lighting, bulging and massive with energy weapons and projectile guns.
"You're sure you're ready?" Stopford asked. What she really wanted to ask was Are you sure you know what the hell you're doing? but that was out of the question, of course.
"Oh, yeah, ma'am." Younts' response scarcely represented proper military phraseology, but there was no mistaking the anticipation in the young woman's voice.
"Time to kick some Puppy ass!" she added, and, despite herself, Stopford chuckled. Then she sobered.
"Then go to it, Ensign," she said, and punched the button.
"Cleaning machines!" Lieutenant Ka-Holmar said, shaking his head in exasperation.
"Yes, sir," his lead trooper said, obviously more than a little embarrassed at having expended ammunition on such an unworthy target.
"Well, don't worry about it," Ka-Holmar reassured him after a moment. "Better safe than sorry. And according to the schematic, we're finally here."
He clambered through the hole burned through the final blast door. The standard-weight hatch to the ship's forward power room loomed before him—still closed, of course—and he exhaled in undeniable relief. Like any Imperial soldier, Ka-Holmar was perfectly prepared to die for the People if that was what the mission required, but he couldn't deny that he preferred the notion of surviving. Which made him grateful that the demolition charge strapped to his back wasn't going to be required after all.
He turned his head to address Sergeant Sa-Ithar.
Power One's hatch flicked open, and Younts and Harriman thundered through it in a deck-pounding run.
Stopford watched the video feed relayed from Younts' helmet sensors as the pair of humans It was not an equitable matchup.
The Melconian EW suits were designed for stealthiness. They carried some armor, but Ka-Holmar's troopers were essentially armed and equipped as light infantry. Marine powered armor, on the other hand, wasn't particularly stealthy. What it was was engineered for close, brutal, heavy combat.
Ka-Holmar never had time to realize what had happened. One instant he was turning to address his sergeant; the next a two-centimeter, armor-mounted power rifle blew a fist-sized hole right through the fusion charge on his back and out through the front of his chest in an explosion of body fluids and splintered bone.
Sergeant Sa-Ithar screamed a warning to the rest of Ka-Holmar's assault team. That was all he had time for before a stream of hypervelocity flechettes from Chief Harriman's armor sliced him in half with all of the neatness and finesse of a chainsaw.
Fire streamed back at the two humans from the Melconians on the other side of the ruptured blast door, but their heavy armor shrugged it effortlessly aside, and they advanced through the hurricane of projectiles and power gun fire like people wading upstream against a stiff current. They reached the blast door, and Younts fired a burst of contact-fused grenades through the opening, then covered Harriman as the chief petty officer gripped the broken duralloy panel in his armor's powered gauntlets and heaved like a fusion-powered Hercules.
The entire blast door panel wrenched out of its guides, and he tossed it aside as Younts went storming through the opening, killing anything that moved.
"Ready to lift, ma'am!"
"Thank you, Major," the human portion of the Maneka/Lazarus fusion acknowledged, and the pod's drive whined as it rose smoothly into the air. It was heavily laden enough to be ponderous, but it accelerated quickly and went streaking off towards the oncoming Melconians.
"Here they come," Tschu said harshly. His face was white and strained, and Lauren could almost physically feel his desire to be somewhere—anywhere—else. But he and Hannah had both stuck with her, and she smiled at them as reassuringly as she could as the Melconian boarders approached the final hatch out of Bravo-Four.
They were alert, she saw. While their point moved right up to the door with his energy lance, the others formed a hollow semicircle around him, watching their back trail and scanning the silently looming banks of machinery to either side. But what none of them was doing, she noted with grim satisfaction, was looking directly upward.