“Locked and loaded.”
“Blue Team, are you in position?” Blue Team was the one sent to capture the engine room and shut down the shields.
“In position.”
“Gold Team, everyone in position?”
This time I answered, too. “In position.”
The six SEALs and I led the way into the bridge. We stepped through the hatch, drew our laser pistols, and began firing. I dropped to one knee and targeted the two sentries standing guard across the deck. I hit the first man before he could even reach for his pistol and the second man as his fingers closed around its grip. The men wore no armor, so my laser cut through them like a javelin. Their blouses caught fire around the wounds. When they fell, I saw the burns on the wall. The laser had shot right through them.
More SEALs jammed in through the door.
The bridge looked more like an office than the control room of a ship. It had computer stations instead of steering wheels. Navigators plotted its course on a computer screen. Beside that station, three men slumped dead in their seats. In the next station, the communications officers lay dead as well. They had been our primary targets as we entered the bridge.
A door on the far side of the bridge opened. The man in the doorway reacted quickly. He swung back into his room, sealing the doors behind him. Alarms went off. Amber and blood-colored lights flashed everywhere.
“Engine room report?” the mission leader called over the interLink.
“We have control. The weapons are down. The shields should be down any minute,” Illych said.
“Step it up. They know we’re on board,” the mission leader said.
“What happened up there?” Illych asked.
“We got spotted. The situation is under control. Now get the shields down. If we don’t see the cavalry soon, we’re in for a beating.”
“You okay, Harris?” Illych asked on a band that the mission leader would not hear.
One of the SEALs used a torch to short-circuit the door to the room off the bridge. He pulled his pistol and stepped in. I saw the red glow of the laser flash across the walls as the SEAL fired two shots into the man at point-blank range.
“We’re pinned down! We’re pinned down!” The call came from the squad guarding the launch bay.
“What is your status?” the mission leader asked.
“We are trapped in the transport.”
“Do you have control of the target area?”
No answer.
“Launch Bay Squad, do you have control of the target area?”
“Grenade! Grenade!” was the last we heard from the squad in the launch bay.
Then someone in the corridor tried to open the hatch and enter the bridge. He had cracked the door less than an inch when one of the SEALs fired through and ended the problem.
“Seal the hatch!” our team yelled. That seemed like a good idea.
“It’s going to get hot up here,” I told Illych. I was not complaining.
“Wait a moment. Just a…Okay, the shields are down,” the Blue Team leader called in.
“We’ve lost Launch Bay Squad. Gold Team, break into squads. Gold 1, hold the bridge. Gold 2, retake the launch bay.” I was in Gold 2, the emergency squad. We were the ones who would catch the shit face-first.
Now that’s a specker, I thought. Why didn’t we just leave more men to hold the launch bay in the first place?
There were forty of us in Gold 2, almost twice as many men as in Gold 1, with good reason. All Gold 1 had to do was hold on to the bridge. The forty of us would have to run the gauntlet. We were going to have to go back down the elevators, if we made it that far. Before we worried about the elevators, we needed to fight our way out of the bridge. And if we failed…At that moment, two thousand men were floating in space outside the ship. They were armed, and they had combat gear, but they would be sitting ducks in a shoot-out with men on a ship. Hell, until we got the launch-bay door open, those men out there were doing little more than waiting to die.
“Harris, are you Gold 1 or Gold 2?” Illych called over.
“Two,” I said.
“You’re in for a fight.”
“Against these stiffs?” I asked, purposely echoing my famous last words from the cockpit. “They didn’t give us any trouble when we took the bridge.”
“I think they’ve figured out what we’re doing,” Illych said. “They’re all over the halls out there. Good thing they have to come to us. Man, I would hate to be the one squeezing through a narrow hatch to get in.”
“Thanks,” I said, knowing that in order to retake the launch bay, Gold 2 would run through the corridor and hatches.
“Oh, you guys will make it through, no problem,” Illych said. “I meant I would hate to be a Mogat squeezing through those halls.”
“Gold 2, stage.”
At the order to stage ourselves, we drew our guns and approached the hatch. SEALs from Gold 1 opened the door for us. Two Gold 2 men leaped through the door firing lasers, hoping to clear a path for the rest of us. The Mogats shot them with so many lasers that they seemed to dissolve into the air. The door slid shut, cutting through the bloody puddle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
We had to get down to the launch bay quickly. Looking at the viewport at the front of the bridge, I could see squads of SEALs and Marines heading for the ship like a swarm of locusts. They were armed and trained, but they could not defend themselves unless we opened the launch-bay locks and cleared a path for them.
“Gold 2, prepare!” the mission leader yelled.
A Gold 1 SEAL tripped the door mechanism, and the panels slid open. With the panels just inches apart, another SEAL ran toward the door, somersaulted past the opening, and tossed a grenade into the hall. The guy at the controls closed the panels the moment the grenade cleared.
There they go using the old dud grenade trick, I thought to myself. It was impressive the first time.
But nobody made a move for the door, and a moment later an explosion rocked the deck.
“Move it! Move it! Move it!”
The hatch slid open. A cloud of smoke rolled in. Another group of SEALs dashed into the smoke, firing blindly. Even with heat-vision technology in their visors, they would not see anything through the smoke. The heat and fire would cloud their vision.
I was in the second wave to leave. We did not fire our lasers. Had we fired, we would have been more likely to hit one of ours than theirs. We ran into the thick white smoke. If we’d had to breathe that smoke, we might have suffocated, but we had rebreathers.
The floor was red and slick with blood. Looking down to get my balance, I saw armor boots with legs still sticking out of them. The blood looked like a bouillabaisse made with bits of armor instead of fish. The grenade tore holes in the walls.
The silver-red beam of a laser flashed past my head. I dropped to one knee, turned in the direction it had come from, and fired. I could not see the person who fired at me. He had probably not seen me, either. I did not have time to check for the kill. As I stood up to continue my charge, a SEAL slammed into my back. I felt another jolt. No doubt someone had run into him.
One of the SEALs in my group had taken a shot in the thigh as he ran through the hall. Three-quarters of the thigh had disintegrated, leaving a strap of inner thigh that looked like cooked meat. The man vacillated. When he could stand the pain, he rolled onto his stomach and shot at the Mogats. When the pain became too much, he rolled onto his side and wrapped his arms around his legs. He was in that position when a laser struck him in the back and killed him. Even in death, he never released his pistol.
Gold 2 lost four men just fighting its way out of the bridge. I did not even bother counting how many men the Mogats lost. There were dead men and body parts all along the corridor. That grenade had blown some of their men right through walls. Some had been blown into walls that did not give. Bloody starbursts outlined the spots where their bodies struck.