Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [95]
And he hoped, for the sake of everybody alive at this moment back on planet Earth, that he hadn’t just made the very last mistake of his career.
Shuttlepod One
Clad in a gray MACO environmental suit, Corporal Peruzzi found the sound of her own breathing distractingly loud. Standing in the shuttlepod’s narrow airlock, her magnetic boots tethering her to the temporarily deactivated grav plating, her phase rifle gripped awkwardly in her gauntleted hands, she did her best to focus past the noise and concentrate on the task at hand.
The airlock’s outer hatch was open to space, while the inner hatch was sealed behind her, providing the cockpit with atmosphere and life-support.
“It’s showtime, Corporal,” O’Neill said, speaking over the comlink in Peruzzi’s suit.
“Acknowledged,” Peruzzi said. “Locked and loaded.” Ever Invincible, she thought. Boo-Yah!
Then someone else spoke inside her helmet. “Mark!”
Hearing Lieutenant Reed’s voice coming to her via relay, Peruzzi raised her rifle, pointing it upward into the open hatchway, where the alien pilot’s small ship—it didn’t look all that much larger than the shuttlepod from here—loomed not five meters away. The other vessel’s aft hatch was prominently visible, awash in the white brilliance of the shuttlepod’s exterior floodlights. The huge Xindi facility, its grapple arms hastily withdrawing from the other vessel in a convincing mechanical approximation of fear, turned very slowly in the silent, trackless space that lay just beyond both vessels.
“Four,” Reed counted. “Three. Two. One.”
A flurry of unintelligible sound filled the next second or so. Then the other ship’s hatch suddenly detached itself from the hull in a silent shower of bright metal fragments and misty beads of rapidly freezing atmosphere.
At once, Peruzzi’s training took possession of her entire nervous system; she sighted and fired on her target in a veritable eyeblink, moving fluidly despite the helmet and the bulky suit that encumbered her.
The rifle’s beam, all but invisible in the absence of atmosphere, reached out and struck the incoming missile, whose trajectory suddenly changed. The flying hatch cover went tumbling off into the stygian void, away from both vessels.
She felt a sharp stitch of heat and pain in her left thigh, which then began growing intolerably cold. Tipping her helmeted head down, she saw that her suit was torn—no, make that sliced—right over the spot from which the pain was emanating. Gravitic particle? she wondered, expecting to die horribly at any moment.
She saw that the rent in her suit was venting atmosphere at a furious clip. Shrapnel, she thought calmly, though she was relieved that she evidently hadn’t been torn apart by an encounter with some particle of exotic matter peculiar to the Delphic Expanse. She felt oddly detached from the notion of dying of garden-variety decompression in a torn pressure suit; her own stoicism, a by-product of her MACO training, surprised her.
But she knew there wasn’t time to worry about either her injuries or her emotional state: she saw that five human shapes were quickly falling in formation from the wounded alien ship, heading through the vacuum straight for the shuttlepod’s ventral hull, and its narrow, open airlock.
And none of those five freefalling bodies were wearing environmental suits, torn or otherwise.
Peruzzi grabbed the captain first, checking much of his velocity by magnetically planting her booted feet. Despite the boots, she was nearly torn free of the deck plates and sent tumbling when Hayes, Kemper, and Money slammed into Archer from behind. Lieutenant Reed was the last to drop inside the shuttlepod.
Peruzzi wasted no time entering the “door close” command into the small control panel built into the inside bulkhead. As the incoming personnel either reached the deck or the ladder leading “down” to it from the outer