The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

The Marines whom Geary had focused on were moving quickly but cautiously to check out the compartment, their heads-up displays highlighting anything that looked unusual or suspicious. In this case, surrounded on the bulkheads and overhead by alien devices of strange design even if they probably fulfilled familiar functions, the heads-ups were keying on almost everything that wasn’t flat bulkhead. In some cases, even seemingly unadorned sections of the walls, overhead, and deck had something about them that made the sensors in the Marine combat armor unhappy.

“Pressure switches?” one of the Marines in the unit Geary was zoomed in on speculated.

“Maybe,” his sergeant replied. “Maybe just cargo-tracking stuff. But maybe not. Keep off ’em.”

“What the hell is this?”

“If you don’t know, don’t touch it! Stop playing tourists and find the air locks and their controls!”

Geary shifted from unit to unit, seeing pretty much the same thing everywhere. Units inside the compartments the combat engineers had breached, moving in zero g as they tried to find all of the hatches leading farther into the enemy ship. “Found one,” a Marine cried. “Are these the controls? They’re set real low, almost on the deck.”

“Duh, brain-dead. These guys are short, remember?”

“Shut up,” their corporal said. “Hey, Sarge, this looks like it. Some sort of knife switch instead of a button, though.”

“Lieutenant?”

“Wait. Okay, Sergeant. The captain says open it up, but be ready for them to be on the other side. Weapons free.”

“Got it. Cover the hatch, you slugs. Flip the switch, Kezar.”

Geary waited, watching, as Corporal Kezar swung the knife switch upward.

And waited.

“Nothing’s happening, Sarge.”

“I can see that. Lieutenant?”

“None of the switches are opening hatches, Sergeant. Get your hacker to work.”

“Cortez! Get that thing open.”

Another Marine huddled by the switch, popping the cover with some difficulty and peering inside. Geary quickly changed views to see what Private Cortez saw, but he couldn’t make out what he was seeing.

The lieutenant’s voice came on again. “What’s the word? Can you override the controls?”

“I can’t even identify the controls!” Private Cortez protested. “This box looks like it oughta be them . . .”

“Then find the input, find some wires—”

“Lieutenant, there ain’t no input that I can see except this swing switch, and there ain’t no wires in this thing. There’s just some kind of mesh in . . . what is that gunk? Gel or something.”

“You can’t— What’s—” The lieutenant must also have been viewing what Cortez and Geary were both looking at. “How the hell does that stuff work?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant! All I do know is I can’t hack something that doesn’t work like anything we’ve got!”

Similar conversations were happening in Marine units at every penetration. “Captain, we’re going to have to blow the air locks,” the lieutenant reported after huddling with his sergeant.

“Are the outer hull penetrations blocked?”

“Sir, I don’t know, but we can operate in vacuum fine—”

“Our orders are to take everything inside this ship as intact as possible, and there are a lot of things that don’t handle vacuum as well as our combat armor,” the captain said. “Hold on. Colonel, we need to know if the hull penetrations in this area have been sealed.”

“Yuhas! We need a green light to blow the locks!”

Almost a minute passed as more and more Marines called up the chain of command for approval to blow open pathways into the ship.

“Colonel Yuhas reports his combat engineers say we’re good to go,” the relieved word finally came down the chain of command. “Blow the bulkheads, not the air locks. We don’t know how they’re sealed or locked. That’s from brigade command. Everybody blow your way inside but avoid going straight through air locks. We’re way behind on movement. Get inside that thing.”

“What’s going on?” Desjani asked.

“They’re blowing internal bulkheads now to get inside,” Geary told her.

“That’s why I saw them plugging holes and rigging emergency air locks on the outside of the hull? Have they seen any Kicks yet?”

“No.” He watched a hundred thumbnail views at once as Marines blasted their way through bulkheads and into passageways and other compartments. “Empty.”

Everywhere the Marines were entering, the superbattleship seemed to be vacant of any crew. The Marines moved in rushes down passageways that weren’t as wide or tall as those on human ships but were still large enough to manage a couple of Marines abreast. Smaller cross-corridors intersected the large passageways in what seemed to be a regular enough grid arrangement, similar to those used by humans. As in human ships, conduits holding wiring and ducts carrying air festooned the overhead, offering grips to the Marines as they pulled themselves along, swimming through zero g. As they advanced, the Marines spread out, penetrating deeper into the ship as well as to each side and up and down through the decks.