Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [85]
"Hell no, sir!" One of the recruits next to him opened fire with a yell, knocking down three compies coming down the corridor.
Lanyan's team reached the end of the hall after purging each sector. It took the better part of two hours before he declared the Goliath's lower deck secure. Seven trainees had been killed in the methodical assault. Acceptable losses.
The General stood in front of the closed lifts at the end of the hall and addressed the breathless commandos. "This is going to be tight. The only bridge access is by these two lifts, one on each side. That creates a strategic bottleneck, since we can only get a small group of you in at a time. No telling how many compies have holed up on the bridge."
He swung his gaze around through his faceplate's limited field of view. "I'm going to lead one charge myself. Ensign Childress will take a group up the second shaft. Childress, pick fifteen of your coolest sharpshooters and crowd them into the elevator car. I'll do the same here, and reactivate both lifts. On my mark, hit the bridge selector so that both groups arrive at the same time."
"Agreed, General!" Childress's voice was husky and eager. "May I suggest, sir, that we limit our weapons to energy dischargers? D-U slugs will make macaroni of the bridge control boards, and I assume you want to fly the Goliath out of here at the end of the day?"
"Good point, Ensign. So ordered. Switch to energy scramblers." Lanyan swapped his projectile weapon for a soldier's stun-pulser. Having watched his fighters clear the lower decks, he tapped the ones who had been the most proficient. Together, they waited at the lift door. His kleebs were acting like a real team, real soldiers. They were getting the hang of this.
When Lanyan used his command codes to restore power to the lifts, the sealed elevator doors slid open--releasing a Soldier compy like a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box. The reeling compy knocked Lanyan over. Two trainees immediately fired a scrambler burst, and the ruined machine jittered and fell heavily on top of the General. "Get this clanker off of me!"
The soldiers lifted the hulk away and helped Lanyan to his feet. Two of the servo systems inside his armored suit had been knocked offline, so he delayed the bridge-assault teams just long enough to reset his suit controls. When all the lights blinked green, Lanyan transmitted to Childress, "Let's go."
He and his chosen group crowded into the first lift. It reminded him of an academy stunt--how many EDF troopers could fit into a ship's elevator?--but there was nothing fun about this operation. At his signal, the two lifts shot upward, arriving in unison at opposite sides of the captive bridge. The doors slid open, and the sweeper teams boiled out.
Energy weapons crackled around Lanyan. Circuitry-numbing bolts played across the first two trainees as they emerged onto the bridge, freezing their suit servos and turning the kleebs into statues.
"Watch who you're hitting, Childress!" Lanyan bellowed, assuming that the opposite team was firing.
"It's not us, sir. The clankers have their own weapons. Must've seized them from the Goliath's armory."
Lanyan ducked out of the way as the firing continued. Static discharges ricocheted like lightning in a bottle. This pitched battle was the compies' last stand. The military robots advanced with the sheer weight of numbers. Lanyan froze a clanker in front of him, then kicked the energy weapon out of its metal hands. Even he hadn't expected so much resistance. "Why the hell are so many of them up here?"
Then he noticed that the bridge's command modules had been pried open, circuitry boards removed, systems wired up to bypasses. After the guillotine command had shut down the Juggernaut engines, the compies had indeed tried to reconfigure all systems to restore control, as expected. I'll be damned if they wouldn't have succeeded in another hour or two.
Right now, the compies must be doing the same thing