The Ascendant Stars - Michael Cobley [84]
Followed by the suffocated, flash-frozen bodies of the captain and his officers.
On board the Starfire, Greg turned to Lieutenant Malachi Ash and said, ‘That came off very well, I think.’
‘I’ll be happier when the ship’s in our hands,’ said Ash. ‘The next part will not be pretty and could go badly wrong if they decide to rig the drives to self-destruct.’
It took twenty minutes to manoeuvre alongside the Hegemony vessel, which was still heading along its original course even though the thrust drive had been shut down. The Starfire’s attitudinal jets were functioning but that was about all – the hyperdrive was half-slagged and most of the generators were blown, which meant that the weaponry could be neither powered nor aimed. Greg just hoped that this hijacking didn’t result in two wrecked ships.
Greg’s experience of close-quarter combat was nearly nonexistent so Ash made him stay with the rearguard, watching over the medical team and the ammo bearers. The Tygran energy weapons were keyed back to non-lethal settings to avoid damaging vital systems. In addition, some carried weighted clubs, daggers and tanglers. Malachi had been aboard this class of Hegemony warship before, and once a beachhead was established around the lateral airlock he was quick to move against the engineering section with the greater part of his troops. A smaller force was sent to secure the aft armoury.
Most of the fighting was over in less than an hour. The injuries were terrible yet the medic, Lieutenant Valerius, remained calm throughout, his tense manner matching his apparently tireless ability to deal with patient after patient. Gashes were pincerwired, burns were dermasprayed, beam- or blade-severed extremities were tagged and stored in a stasiscase while the wounds were coated in isolation gel then hardshelled. By the end the tally had reached two dead (and swiftly jettisoned out of the nearest airlock), five walking wounded and three stretcher cases.
Everyone looked bruised and battered and physically drained. Close-quarters and hand-to-hand combat against adversaries who were two, sometimes three feet taller (and correspondingly brawnier) was taxing, even with two- or three-to-one odds. This difference in scale was reflected in the ship’s interior. On his way to engineering, where Ash had set up his command post, Greg noticed the height and width of the passageways and doors, the oddly oppressive gold and grey colour scheme, and elaborate bas-relief mouldings that covered the upper half of every bulkhead.
Two of Ash’s men were dragging a dead Sendrukan out into the corridor by the feet as Greg arrived. Past the entrance to the engineering deck, the ornamentation was impressively overbearing, more bas-relief mouldings, several life-size silver statues mounted at head height in the corners, each demonstrating a different preindustrial technical skill. Immense consoles dominated the room with a large, complex one occupying half the floor and butting against a wide window broken into hexagonal segments. Cabling sprouted from various open panels on the big console, where a group of Tygran techs worked, watched over by Ash.
‘Ah, Mr Cameron, good of you to join us,’ Ash said. ‘As you can see, we are in the process of rerouting bridge functions down here – in fact the Sendrukans had nearly accomplished it when we so rudely interrupted them. Luckily, Second Senior Instrumentationalist Panabec here has agreed to help us.’
A Sendrukan stood nearby, cuffed and shackled, towering over his two armed guards. His dark blue uniform was torn at one shoulder and his broad face bore a glumly stoic look. Greg wondered at the wisdom of taking advice from an enemy prisoner until one of the Tygran techs turned and nodded to Ash.
‘That’s the AI cores wiped, sir,’ he said.