It took me another moment to realize that Mars had said those things to distract me. I took a deep breath, and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“No problem, sir,” said Mars. I could hear the smile in his voice. “Go with God.”
My blood pressure returning to normal, I turned to look at screens and saw the beginning of the anomaly forming. The electricity of the anomaly was not as bright as the nuclear flare, but it was sustained. It looked like a bubble of light in the darkness of space. Jagged tentacles of electricity reached out from it.
“Here comes the dangerous part of the ride,” I said.
“You’ll be fine, sir,” Mars said.
In less than a second, the lightning from the anomaly stretched and overtook the battleship. The screens on the first row of the array showed a brief flash of white and went dead. The screens on the second row showed lightning dancing on the hull of the battleship. They showed transports peeling away from the hull like dried leaves falling from a tree.
Electricity continued dancing along the hull. More screens went bright, then dark. Somehow, the electricity worked its way inside the battleship; I could see it on three of the internal screens. Unstable light danced inside the hallways, an obscene wattage, multiple millions of joules, more than enough power to stop my heart and sear my skin and melt my eyes.
The electricity ran through the ship like a flood, splashing glare everywhere. It happened so quickly, literally in a flash. One moment I saw monitors winking out of existence, the next moment all was silent. I sat in the cockpit aware that if a catastrophe were going to happen, it would already have occurred.
“Mars, can you hear me?” I asked.
No one responded.
We’ve either made it through, or Mars has died, I thought. Then I came up with another possibility—my communications gear might have fried.
I tried to raise Mars on several frequencies and had no luck. Then I tried Nobles. When he did not respond, it occurred to me that he might have had a heart attack. The poor son of a bitch might have died right there, sitting in his pilot’s seat just a few feet away from me.
If he was having heart problems, there was nothing I could do. I could not open his armor; we had purged the oxygen from the cabin. Not knowing what else to do, I tapped my fingers on the glass visor of his helmet.
“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, his voice groggy.
“You fell asleep?” I asked, feeling both relieved and embarrassed.
“Sorry, sir,” Nobles said. “When are we going to make the broadcast?”
“You slept through the entire thing?” I asked, now realizing why he looked so relaxed. Wondering if the sleep had helped him avoid a panic attack or if the sleep had been the attack, I patted Nobles on his armored shoulder, and said, “Let’s take our bird out of here and find out where we are.”
“Yes, sir,” Nobles said, sounding as if I had woken him from a trance. He flipped a switch, and the lights came back online in the cockpit. The gauges in the instrument panel shone their low green-and-white glow. The runner lights along the base of the transport started, shining bright light all around the landing bay. Hitting our thrusters ever so slightly, he lifted us off the ground to rotate the transport so that our nose faced the runway.
He tapped a button and looked out the windshield. When he did not get the response he wanted, he tapped the button several more times. “COE 1, this is Marine 1. The atmospheric gates are not responding. Repeat, COE 1, I am unable to open the gates.” He sounded so damn official when he hit the mike.
“Lieutenant Mars warned me that this might happen while we were prepping for launch,” Nobles said.
“Come again,” I said.
“The atmospheric locks are not responding, sir. Mars said that could happen. He said something about taking our fate in our own hands by flying a wreck,” Nobles said. “I didn’t think we’d survive the broadcast, that’s why I took that sleeping pill.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The doors of the atmospheric locks might have been knocked out of alignment when we crashed through the other ships, or the controls for opening the door may have been fried when we passed through the broadcast zone. We were trapped either way.
Nobles parked the transport and opened the rear hatch for me. The artificial gravity that rooted me to the deck of the transport did not extend beyond its ramp. I leaped into the void and floated across the open landing-bay floor as smoothly as a cloud rolls across the sky. Below me, I saw the rubberized insulation that the Corps of Engineers used to coat the floor, walls, and ceiling. The stuff had probably saved our lives; a lot of electricity had pulsed through this ship.
“Speck,” I said.
“What is it?” asked Nobles.
I drifted right up to the wall and pounded a fist into the insulation. It was rigid. Hoping to peel the rubber away, I tried stabbing my fingers into the rubber. It did not give way.
“They sealed the doors to the ship,” I said. I had hoped to search the ship for explosives or maybe a laser welder, something I could use to cut through the atmospheric locks.
“It’s insulation,” Nobles informed me. “That’s what kept the electricity out of the landing bay.”
“It’s also sealing us in,” I pointed out, my temper starting to get the better of me. I silently toyed with the idea of pulling my combat knife from my rucksack, but I knew I couldn’t even nick industrial-grade insulation using a simple knife. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything we can use to cut our way out?”
“You mean like a laser welder?” asked Nobles.
“Yeah,” I said.
“No, sir. Did you bring any weapons we can use?”
“I have an M27 and a torpedo.”
“Didn’t you say the torpedo was a nuke?” asked Nobles.
“Affirmative.”
“Maybe we should save that for a last resort, sir.”
“There has got to be some way out of here,” I said. Pushing off the rubberized wall, I launched myself past the transport and glided to the far end of the bay. With its electronics off-line, the massive atmospheric lock was just another wall. It was designed to be bulletproof, fireproof, and radiation resistant. I might have been tempted to fire my M27 at it, but firing a gun in a vacuum with neither gravity nor air friction to slow the bullets down was never a good idea.
“Speck,” I muttered as I kicked off the lock, sending myself past the transport. Gliding in the null gravity, I had no more capacity to steer myself than a bullet or a billiard ball. I sailed past the nose of the transport, then along the side and pushed a different wall, reangling myself so that I entered the transport through its ass, where the artificial gravity brought me to my feet.
Dragging my feet along the ramp to stop myself, I turned to take one last look across the landing bay. Surely there had to be a welding torch or a drill. Hell, even a particle beam might do the trick. A particle beam …A tiny pistol—its disruptive beam might tear through the insulation.
The standard-issue particle-beam pistol was small …so small you could throw one in your rucksack and forget it was there. I hit the button, closing the rear doors, then grabbed my rucksack and headed up to the cockpit.
“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, as I burst into the cabin.
“I have an idea,” I said as I pulled out my clothes. I pulled out my Charlie service pants and blouse, not really flinging them away, but not watching where they landed. I had underwear, shoes, socks, toiletries, my M27, and three clips of ammunition.
And then, at the bottom of my rucksack where I hoped I might find a particle-beam pistol, I found nothing.
“What are you looking for?” Nobles asked.
“A particle-beam weapon,” I said.
“Did you bring one?”
“Apparently not,” I said. “I don’t suppose you did?” I already knew the answer, but he confirmed it. Nobles was a pilot, not a fighter.