Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [72]
At the navigation station, a grim Eolus began to move the Eldorado, easing it toward the group of hijacked Mantas.
Briggs looked up. "It's holding, Admiral." He had used up his tubes, slathering the fast-hardening substance all around the entrance. The survivors knew they would never get out. This bridge would be their tomb.
One of the wall plates buckled. Unable to break open the welded door, the compies began to rip their way directly through the bulkheads. "Oh, for crying out loud!" Briggs blurted.
"This is really messed up," said the station officer, shaking her head. "Really messed up."
"How long did you say this barricade has to last, Admiral?" Briggs asked.
Hunched over the command chair, Eolus gradually accelerated the Juggernaut. "Easy . . . easy . . . not enough to scare them. Nothing to worry about, little robots." As the Eldorado approached the waiting Mantas, the compies would assume the flagship had been captured as well.
Out-of-control robots continued to batter the walls, ripping away the plates, thrusting their metal hands through. A crack appeared in the fresh polymer weld, and the whole main bridge door began to shudder.
"It's not going to hold." Briggs looked down at his empty tubes of epoxy.
Rossia repeated the words to his treeling, sending out a continuous message. He felt detached from everything that was happening around him; it was the only way he could keep functioning. "It's not going to hold."
"Now, worst part in a commander's career." Admiral Eolus looked at the three survivors with him. "You are not stupid. You all know what we have to do. We can't let compies seize our battle group, and I don't believe in a completely hopeless situation."
Eolus expected and received no argument from his comrades. He paced, ignoring the battering sounds of compies on the other side of the wall. "Mr. Rossia, inform the rest of the EDF what we plan to accomplish here. That way at least they'll know."
After the green priest sent a last message through his treeling, he turned his cockeyed gaze up at the man. "Did you know I'm the only person in the history of Theroc to survive a wyvern attack? Everyone thought I was very lucky." He paused, the silence broken only by the clamor of Soldier compies. "I'm not going to survive this one, though."
"No, Mr. Rossia. None of us are."
As the Eldorado eased in amongst the waiting Mantas, Eolus input the command string that every commanding officer knew and hoped never to use. The Juggernaut's computers accepted the emergency verification, and the massive engines grew hotter and hotter, building to a swift overload. The swarthy man muted the countdown. "Damn thing's too melodramatic." He sat back in his command chair, thick arms crossed over his chest.
With a coordinated surge, the Soldier compies broke through the doorwelds and ripped support bars out of the bulkhead wall, knocking aside plate sheeting. Now with nothing to stop them, the military robots streamed onto the bridge. Alarms began to sound at all stations, warning of imminent danger--as if any bridge crewmember could possibly be unaware that a truckload of crap had just hit a turbine-powered fan.
Briggs threw himself bodily against the compies, but the robots swept over him like a tidal wave overwhelming a bit of dandelion fluff. The compies were covered with blood.
Admiral Eolus swiveled his chair. The countdown on his panel reached the last few seconds. "Here's something special for you, you wind-up bastards," he said. "Bend over and smile."
Self-destruct routines turned the Eldorado into a small-scale supernova, and the shockwave swept outward to engulf all eleven captured Mantas.
42
NIRA
The flight to the Dobro settlement was torture. Designate