The SEALs had 121 men on that derelict battleship, but they only used fifteen to capture the transport. The SEALs adjusted to their environment. Having as many men as possible might win battles on an open field; but in the confines of a crowded transport, too many men meant impaired mobility.
We took no prisoners as we captured the transport. From the commandos to the copilot, we made sure that everybody died. The dirty part of reconnaissance work is that it leaves no room for mercy.
After clearing out the bodies, we crammed 116 SEALs into the kettle. The five we could not fit had to wait on the derelict. They got a better deal than the men hiding among the wrecked fighters outside. There are no injuries in a space battle. If anything breaches your armor, you die. It does not matter whether an enemy laser pierces your heart or your foot. If your armor depressurizes, you may freeze or suffocate or burst; but you will certainly die.
We packed the transport so tightly that three of the SEALs had to ride in the cockpit along with Illych and me. We wasted no floor space. Not in the kettle. Not in the cockpit.
As they had before, the SEALs headed into battle in silence. In the cockpit, we stood pressed together, watching the five who could not come with us salute as our transport lifted from the deck.
Illych broke the silence. “Think we can pull this off, Harris?”
“Against these stiffs?” I asked. “What could go wrong?” Even as I said this, I regretted it. It had the ring of other famous last words.
“You’re joking, right?” Illych asked. We both knew we were flying a load of 116 men into a ship with a two-thousand-man crew, not counting commandos.
“Yeah, I’m joking,” I said. That was a lie. Had Illych asked me earlier, I would have said it was not possible to take an entire transport without losing a man. Sometimes it seemed like the Mogats were sleepwalking.
Illych and I never took our gazes from the scene outside the cockpit during the return flight. Between the SEALs and the Marines, we had two thousand men hiding in the wreckage around us. They waited to pounce like camouflaging insects.
Things look smaller in death than they do in life, even battleships. Looking at the derelict battleship with its darkened windows, I did not appreciate its size. The ships of the old Galactic Central Fleet had diamond-shaped hulls with rounded bows. Like all U.A. ships, they were wider than they were long.
Coming around the stern of this live battleship, I saw that we were smaller than the tips of its wings. Our transport was meant to hold one hundred men, one man for every twenty on that ship. We were a flea creeping up on a big dog. If we got in, we might draw blood.
“We’re coming in for a landing,” I called back over the interLink. We had to watch what we said now that we were wearing Mogat armor. The interLink equipment in the old combat armor had limited frequencies. We used a frequency we had never heard the Mogats use, but we had no way of knowing if they listened in on us.
We floated into the launch bay and hovered over the deck as the first of the atmospheric locks sealed behind us. In this fifty-year-old ship, the locks did not have the transparent electrostatic shields you saw on modern ones. The doors were enormous metal blast shields. We flew forward twenty yards, and a second gate closed behind us. Now we were inside the ship’s atmosphere. Illych used the thrusters to guide us down, but he cut them a bit soon, and we landed hard.
“Nice landing,” I said. “Now that you are dispensable again, are you going to join the fun?” Having flown the transport back, Illych was no longer any more important than anyone else to the mission.
“That’s why I came,” he said, and he had that same giddiness that I heard the first time I saw him in combat. He pulled out his laser pistol and held it up for me to see. “You know, I’d give up a week’s pay to use a particle beam instead of a laser on this one.”
“They have lasers, so we use lasers,” I said. “We need to blend in.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,” Illych said.
“Well, good luck, Illych,” I said.
“Good luck, Harris.”
I left the cockpit and practically slid down the ladder. We stood silent, staring at the rear hatch as the big metal doors slid open. The bright lights of the launch bay shone in from the top, pouring a wedge of glare across the floor.
We had our orders. We would divide up. Fifteen men would remain in the transport, hiding wherever they could and killing any unlucky maintenance men who happened to see them. Another forty men would head to the engine room to shut down the shields. Illych went with that group.
That left sixty-three men to head for the bridge. I went with that squad. We would “clear the bridge” quickly, a polite way of saying we would kill every officer and seal the hatch. If we moved quickly enough and targeted the helm and communications, we could prevent the ship from fleeing the scene or putting out a distress signal.
Having flown return flights with Mogat commandos, I knew that they generally removed their helmets before stepping off their transport. We kept them on. The SEALs were all clones of the Adam Boyd variety. They all looked alike. They were short, bald, and marked with the distinctive bony ridge across their brows. Had we removed our helmets, I would have been the only non–Adam Boyd face in the crowd, and the Mogats knew my kind.
In a world with no clones, a transport loaded with one hundred identical men would raise suspicion. So might a hundred commandos pouring out of a transport wearing their helmets. We had no other options. We rushed off the transport and walked quickly across the deck of the launch bay. One sailor stopped to watch us. He waved in our direction. Not knowing what else to do, I waved back but kept with the pack.
“Everything okay?” a crewman asked as we hustled past.
No one answered. He stood and watched us, but did nothing. Then we were out the door and down the hall.
We marched toward the central corridor of the ship. The smaller squad broke off and headed toward the engine room at the back of the ship. My squad turned toward the front. We knew in advance that the elevators were too small to hold sixty-three men; so we divided up and took separate paths. By the time I reached the last bank of elevators, there were only six men with me.
We moved through the hall in absolute silence. We did not draw our guns. We did not remove our helmets. Some of the crew stopped and stared at us, but no one approached us. Their ship was in enemy territory, and they were on alert. The brass had wisely not withdrawn the call to general quarters, so the entire crew was engaged.
The seven of us took the elevator at the front of the ship. I did not like traveling in an elevator. It was a bottleneck. Once the doors sealed, we would be helpless prisoners until they reopened. We waited for our elevator, watching sailors running past. Two sailors came to wait with us. We did not speak with them. If they headed to the bridge, we would kill them in a few minutes. We were a hundred men capturing a ship with over two thousand able-bodied crewmen. We would have no time for prisoners.
I stepped into the elevator and stared straight ahead when the door opened. The SEALs crowded around me, leaving an unreasonable amount of room for the two sailors. They congregated on the other side of the car, quietly whispering to each other. Two floors up, they left us without so much as a sideward glance. We continued to the top deck.
I decided to risk a communication. “Illych, you in place?”
“We’re just waiting for the signal. What’s taking so long?”
“We had farther to go,” I said.
I was not in charge. This was a SEAL operation, with regular Navy and Marine support.
Leaving the elevator, I led my little band to the main corridor. When I looked back over my shoulder, I saw the rest of the team catching up with us. They pushed through the halls quickly. Sailors stepped out of their way.
“Launch Bay Squad, are you in position?” the SEAL commanding the mission asked.