The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

A smaller window to one side briefly puzzled Geary, then he realized it offered views from the shuttles rapidly closing in on the hull of the superbattleship. He tapped one, getting a large view of the alien ship, its newly pitted armor looming on all sides as if the shuttle were flying toward a massive, slightly curving wall. Was that a large hatch sealed tight? It looked like a cargo hatch. Nearby was what seemed to be a personnel access, far smaller and not even as big as one intended for humans. Could a Marine in combat armor get through something that size?

The shuttle glided to a halt as its bow thrusters fired, hovering just short of the superbattleship. So close Geary could see the scars of impacts, could spot the place where what had probably been a shield generator had been before it had been blasted to ruin by fire from the battleships.

It all lay silent, as if the superbattleship were lifeless inside as well as out, a derelict crewed only by the dead.

That was possible. The defensive fire they had seen could have been the work of weapons set to fire automatically under control of computerized systems.

Geary didn’t believe that, though. Neither, obviously, did the Marines.

He wondered how it would look, how it would feel, if the superbattleship self-destructed, while he was viewing it virtually from so close-up. The thought put a chill through him, and Geary looked for something to distract him from a possibility that he could do nothing about now.

Spotting thumbnails where activity seemed to be going on, he brought those to the fore, seeing views from the combat armor of Marines actually on the superbattleship’s hull. The tags on the views identified them as combat engineers, and as Geary watched he saw them placing breaching charges to blow open one of the big hatches like the one he had seen earlier.

The view shifted rapidly as the Marines huddled by the hull, then shook as directional charges went off, blowing out portions of the hatch, the shock of the explosions transmitting through the hull to rattle the Marines clinging to it.

The view swayed again dizzily as the combat engineers swung back to the hatch, followed by curses over the comm circuits. “We didn’t get through!” “How thick is this stuff?”

Then came orders from Carabali, sounding in every combat engineer’s battle armor. “Double up the breaching charges.”

The Marine engineers moved quickly, not really needing the “Move it!” encouragement from their squad leaders as they rigged breaching charges in tandem to get through the armor protecting the superbattleship. The delay had thrown off the shuttles, which were clustering near the superbattleship without anyplace to drop off their Marines. Views jumped again as the combat engineers put distance between themselves and the breaching charges. “Fire in the hole!”

How old was that warning, and what had it originally referred to? Geary wondered. Maybe it had once meant someone had physically lit a fuse with an open flame. Now it just warned of an explosion soon to come.

The view shook again, prolonged this time. Marines moved with cries of triumph to holes spearing through the armored hatch. “Five more! Here and here! That’ll break this section free. Go!”

Geary scanned the other windows, seeing similar activity under way at every point where the Marines were trying to blast their way inside the superbattleship. One by one, the breaching teams were creating holes large enough for Marines to pull themselves inside.

He called up a different window, this one showing the view from a Marine who had made it inside a similar cargo-hatch area. There were no lights, just a dark void. “No gravity inside. It’s broke, or they shut it off.” Moving cautiously, the Marine moved to one side as more Marines entered, their infrared-beam lights providing ghostly images of a large compartment that bore some resemblance to that on a human ship. But then, why wouldn’t it? The requirements for moving cargo were the same no matter what creature was doing the job.

“No internal gravity?” Geary heard General Charban comment behind him. “Marines train for that, don’t they?”

“That’s right,” Desjani replied. “They prefer to fight with a gravity field, but they can handle zero g.” She sounded proud of that, that the Marines could deal with something ground forces weren’t trained to handle. Geary had heard her bemoan Marine behavior and mind-sets more than once among fleet officers, but when it came to outsiders like ground forces and aerospace defense, the fleet and the Marines suddenly became brothers and sisters in arms.