Star Marines. Ian Douglas

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      6

       12 FEBRUARY 2314

       Assault Detachment Alpha

       Battlespace

       1508 hrs, GMT

      Garroway felt his gut twist as the autie spun end for end. The image of the objective didn’t change, of course, since it was coming from a remote drone. At least they had an image now; from the drone’s vantage point, it looked as though the XEL lasers had burned another hole into the Xul giant, roughly amidships.

      A flashing red light illuminated the autie’s cargo deck—warning that the compartment was now in vacuum. For several minutes, now, the atmosphere had been bleeding away into storage tanks belowdeck. The Marines did not want to have to deal with the explosive effects of sudden decompression when the aft hatch opened up.

      Acceleration slammed again into Garroway’s chest, and he heard the stifled gasps of several other Marines on the platoon channel. The autie was decelerating hard, backing down toward the objective as it fell stern-first, killing its residual velocity.

      He found himself fervently hoping that the navigational AI piloting the autie knew what it was doing. Inertialess field or no, if they hit the Xul vessel too fast, all the Oannan technology in the Solar System wouldn’t keep them all from being reduced to bloody paste inside their armor—Spam in a can, as the old saying put it.

      He wondered what Spam was. It didn’t sound pleasant.

      To take his mind off that claustrophobic image, he checked his Hawking 34mm chaingun—again. The Preble, fortunately, had been carrying a store of live ammo, including cases of 34mm rounds, both AP and HE, and the Navy ratings had passed what they had down into the autie en route. Unfortunately, the supplies of expendable ammo were sharply limited—only about a thousand rounds per man. That meant the Marines’ ammo bins were less than a third full.

      Still, it was better than going into live combat with training rounds. And the team’s pig-gunners all had fresh power packs. His chaingun loadout gave him a standard AP-HE three-to-one ratio—three rounds of armor piercing, followed by one of high explosive, a mix guaranteed to cut through just about anything a human opponent could throw at them.

      Of course, these were not human opponents. He tried not to think about the possible consequences of that, either.

      The deceleration went on for a long time. At the last moment, as his vision started to blur, Garroway saw the autie on the drone feed, a tiny bright star moving fast—too fast—toward the gaping hole in the Hunter ship’s flank.

      Hell, where was the external feed from the autie? There ought to be a camera up, to show them where they were going … but there was no time to think about that.

      “Brace for impact!” he called over the platoon channel.

      In the image window in his mind, the star vanished into the far vaster mass of the Xul ship, slicing through tangled wreckage. The jolt slammed him back against the seat, nearly driving the breath from his body. The impact was silent in hard vacuum, of course, but he could feel the shuddering, grating vibrations of hull metal sliding through whatever the hell the Xul vessel was made of, transmitted through deck and seat.

      And then he felt the familiar dropping sensation of zero gravity. The seat grabbers released him, and he flexed his body, drifting into the aisle between the seats, which now felt more like a tunnel, with no up or down, no deck or overhead. “Okay, Marines! Stand up! By twos! Secure your drift!”

      The tunnel began filling with armored Marines moving gently out of their seats and turning to face aft, gripping the seat backs in gauntleted hands to keep from floating free. Aft, the main hatchway was opening up, the ramp swinging slowly out of the way. Peering past the shoulders of the Marines in front of him, Garroway could see … blackness. An empty cavern.

      At least the hatch is opening, he thought. If the mechanism had been damaged by the autie’s tail-first impact, they would have had to emerge one at a time from the single-man hatches forward, an awkward and deadly way of entering combat.

      “Ramp down!” the autie’s crew chief yelled. “You’re clear to go!”

      “Okay, Marines,” Garroway called. “It’s going to be a close-quarters tangle in there. Weapon status on safety-interrupt! Acknowledge!”

      Acknowledgments came back in rapid succession. With safety-interrupt engaged in their combat suit computers, their weapons would lock each time their line of fire intersected a fellow Marine.

      “Boarding party away!” Garroway called. “Gung ho!”

      The ancient battle cry was a contraction of a Chinese phrase, gung-ya hod-za, meaning “everyone pull together,” a beloved relic of the Corps’ deployment into China during the early twentieth century. In this case, pull together was meant literally. Gripping the seatbacks, the twin line of Marines had to haul themselves along, everyone moving in perfect unison to avoid colliding with one another. The bulky, two-meter suits, heavy with external armament and СКАЧАТЬ