“Seal it,” I snapped.
“Automatic,” she replied.
The ship shuddered again.
“They’re hitting that section,” Frede said, almost calmly. “They’re trying to knock out our engines.”
I jinked the ship back and forth, trying to keep their laser beams from overpowering the screen shielding the engine section. But the weapons of six battle cruisers all firing at us were impossible to evade entirely. Apollo bounced and shook like a rat in a terrier’s jaws.
One of the Skorpis cruisers blew up, victim of a Commonwealth station’s guns. But the others pressed their attack even harder. One of my display screens sputtered and went dark. The overhead lights flickered fitfully.
And the surface of Loris still seemed to be a million light-years away. We were diving toward that blue and white planet, hoping desperately that the Commonwealth defenders would allow us through their planetary screen and shoot the Skorpis warships off our back.
“Power drain exceeding safety limits,” Jerron said tensely. “The shield isn’t going to hold up more than another fifteen seconds.”
“More nuclear missiles on their way!”
I saw them in the main display screen and turned the ship to avoid them. But their guidance sensors had locked on to us.
“Hang on!”
Three explosions hit us almost simultaneously. Display screens burst in showers of sparks all across the bridge. The lights blew out. Acrid smoke filled the darkness.
The red emergency lights came on. In the dimness I saw that the bridge crew was still alive, though we would all have bad bruises from our safety harnesses.
“Power’s gone,” Jerron muttered.
“We’re dead meat.”
“Not yet, we aren’t,” I said, unbuckling my harness. “They said they wanted to take us alive.”
Frede smiled grimly. “Break out the rifles and sidearms,” she said. “We’ll make a fight of it.”
A wild thought spun into my mind. A memory of ancient days when sailing ships grappled and sent boarding parties to seize their opponents. The Skorpis were going to board us, I knew. What if we ambushed their boarding party and then seized their battle cruiser?
“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “We don’t have much time.”
As we were passing out the hand weapons to the entire crew we heard the thump and clang of a Skorpis ship mating its air lock to our main hatch. With our sensors down, I could not tell if it was a shuttle craft or one of the battle cruisers.
“If that’s a shuttle,” I said, “there can’t be more than twenty or thirty warriors on board.”
“More likely it’s a battle cruiser,” said Frede. “They wouldn’t risk a shuttle with all the shooting going on out there.”
“And they know they’ll need more than thirty warriors to take us down,” Emon added, trying to sound cocky.
“Good,” I said. “Then after we finish the boarding party we can take over their ship.”
Someone laughed in the darkness and muttered, “Yeah, the thirty-five of us against a couple hundred Skorpis.”
There was no time to worry about the odds. The Skorpis would quickly burn through our locked hatch. I deployed my crew at the end of the short passageway leading from the main hatch to the power ladder that went down to the main deck.
“Let them into the passageway, then cut them down while they’ve got no place to hide,” I said.
I placed Emon and two other crewmen on the rungs of the ladder, where they could pop up and fire along the passageway. I flattened myself on the deck on the other side of the ladder’s hatch, hugging a rifle in both arms, behind a metal table we dragged out of a crewman’s quarters. Frede and the others were farther down the passageway, at the next ladder-way down, ready to fire at the Skorpis boarders or duck down to the main deck and continue the fight there if the Skorpis got past our first line of defense.
We barely had time to get ourselves set. The Skorpis did not bother trying to melt the hatch’s locking mechanism with a laser. They attached an explosive charge to the hatch and set it off. The blast knocked the heavy metal hatch inward, banging halfway down the passageway. Anyone standing there would have been flattened.
The Skorpis were so big that they had to squeeze through the hatch one at a time. In the dim lighting of the smoke-filled passage I saw the first one step through, a heavy rifle pointed straight ahead, helmet brushing the overhead, cat’s eyes peering into the darkness warily. We could have potted him easily, but I wanted that passageway filled with as many of their boarding party as possible before we started mowing them down.
They were wearing body armor. They trudged down the passageway carefully, their boots as noiseless as cat’s feet on the metal deck plates. Emon and his two crewmates kept their heads down, out of sight, waiting as they clung to the ladder’s rungs. I huddled behind the overturned table, scarcely breathing.
The Skorpis warriors stood for several moments, as if waiting for something. Then I heard a muffled explosion from somewhere. And another. They were blowing in our auxiliary hatches! They must have assault teams in space suits breaking into the ship from all three hatches at once!
My brilliant plan was mincemeat. We had to get down onto the main deck and fight at least three boarding parties at once.
“Fire!” I screamed as I raised myself to my knees and cut the first Skorpis in half with a bolt from my rifle.
My senses went into overdrive and the world around me slowed into a dreamlike torpor. I saw Emon and his little team raise their heads leisurely above the ladder hatch’s sill and squeeze the triggers of their rifles. More laser beams came sizzling over my head from Frede and her team. The Skorpis warriors, huge and clumsy in the confines of the passageway, died in their tracks, slumping to their knees as laser beams burned holes through their armor, falling sluggishly, weapons dropping from their lifeless fingers. Their death screams sounded like eerie keening wails, echoing off the passageway’s metal bulkheads. Their bodies even blocked the hatch, making it difficult for more of them to get in.
But they fired as they fell. They died fighting. More of them pushed through the bodies of their own dead to worm their way on their bellies toward us.
“Everybody down to the main deck,” I yelled.
Too late. One of the dying warriors pulled a grenade from his equipment belt and tossed it toward the hatch. I saw it wobbling on a lazy arc toward Emon and his crewmen. I fired at it, hit it, and it exploded in a shower of white-hot shrapnel. Howls of pain came from the ladderway. A body thudded down onto the main deck.
I crawled along the deck plates, firing into the crouching Skorpis who were using their own dead as shields for themselves. I rolled headfirst down into the ladder well, grabbed a rail and let myself slide down the rest of the way to the main deck.
Emon’s head and shoulders were covered with blood, his own and his crewmates’. One of the men sprawled dead on the deck, the other clutched a shredded arm with one hand.
“I’m okay,” Emon said. “I can still shoot.” But when he tried to stand he staggered into my arms.
I pulled him away from the ladderway and into the comparative safety of a compartment hatch. Then I went back and got the other wounded man. I saw laser beams zipping past the open ladder hatch, up above.
Sitting the wounded man against the bulkhead of the compartment, I told Emon, “The Skorpis will be pouring down that ladderway in a few moments.”
“I’ll hold ’em off,” he said, hefting his rifle in bloodied hands.
“Do the best you can,” I said. I left him there and sprinted down the passageway toward Frede and the rest of our crew.
“They blew the other hatches,” I told her.