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  Mat went first, with Reggie right behind him as usual, then Deke and I followed with the others behind us. We headed aft: I could see from the entrance that the hatch to the bridge was sealed off by a thick slab of alloy. The auxiliary bridge was back by Engineering, deeper inside the armored core of the ship, and if there were any of the ship's command crew left, that's where they'd be.

  It wasn't a huge ship, maybe three hundred meters from stem to stern, and we were only a hundred meters from the aft end of the shaft, but it seemed to stretch on forever like a hallway in a nightmare. I tried not to think about what would happen to us if we took another hit right now, but I kept having flashes in my head of the ship tearing apart and all of us being ejected into space. It would probably be painless, running out of oxygen and slowly fading, but the thought of being out there alone still scared the shit out of me.

  The thought of what happened after wasn't too comforting either.

  "Mitchell, Conner," Mat said as we finally came up on the exit hatch for the Auxiliary Bridge and started dragging against the roughened surface of the tunnel wall to slow ourselves down. "Go on down to Engineering and see what the situation is with the drive. Also, find out if there are any ship's officers there and let them know what the rest of us are doing. Give me a status report as soon as you can."

  "On it," I responded, pushing past him, kicking off with a foot towards the open hatchway at the end of the access tunnel just twenty meters farther down.

  "How the hell is he so calm?" Deke muttered on what I hoped was a private channel to me.

  "How the hell are we?" I countered, flipping over to catch the soles of my boots against the lip of the hatch, then pulling myself through.

  The tunnel exited right next to the terminus of the lift bank, just outside the radiation lock---sort of an airlock that could be sealed to prevent radiation leaks in case the inner containment walls between the Engineering section and the reactor were breached. It was shut, twenty centimeters of lead and biphase carbide separating us from the Engineering compartment.

  "Oh, fuck me," Deke hissed as he emerged from the hatch behind me.

  "They must have taken a hit near the reactor," I said numbly, a sense of unreality settling over me. "They're all dead in there, or they will be soon."

  "Let's get back to Mat and the others."

  I nodded agreement, then realized he couldn't see it and tried to snap myself out of the stupor I was settling into. "Yeah," I said, following him back through.

  They were all dead. I'd just been talking to some of them a few hours ago, the ship's Engineering trainers and the cadets who'd been working a shift there. Who was on right now? I couldn't make myself remember, maybe because I didn't want to. I could have asked Deke, but I found I didn't want to do that either.

  The central access tunnel was empty except for us. We pulled ourselves through the hatch to Deck Four, where the Auxiliary Bridge was located. On bigger ships, cruisers and the bigger battle cruisers, there were a dozen decks or more; but this was just a little insystem patrol vessel. Not room for that many crew on a little boat like this, with most of the space reserved for weapons, reactor and fuel. And we knew where most of the crew was, now.

  The corridors on Deck Four were empty, too. We paced through them using our sticky plates, absurd armored hulks lumbering like babies learning to walk until we reached the hatch to the Auxiliary Bridge. I pushed the palm plate and the hatch slid aside. The Auxiliary Bridge wasn't a large compartment, and it seemed a bit absurd to see ten people in vacuum gear crammed into it. I didn't waste time trying to figure out which one was Mat, just broadcast on the open channel.

  "Engineering is sealed in, Mat," I said. "They must have been hit, too."

  "I figured," he rumbled, and he gestured towards the readout at the command station. "We're running on batteries."

  "Did you find any of the ship's crew?" Deke asked him.

  I nearly didn't hear Mat's answer: my attention was focused on the main viewscreen. It was two-dimensional and much smaller than the big holographic display on the main bridge, but to me it looked like the view from the Judgment Seat of God. A ship hung off our starboard, at the very edge of optical magnification, probably several kilometers away but still terrifyingly close in space terms. Its lines were tantalizingly different than anything built by men but familiar in their utility: fusion drive bell at the rear, armor at the rounded nose, weapons pods jutting out menacingly from the flanks. She was a Tahni starship, one of their smaller Transition Drive ships of a class that we didn't even have; the Fleet Intelligence files they'd shown us in class called it a corvette, which was an inexact application of an ancient term that used to refer to old water-navy vessels. Whatever you wanted to call it, it was armed with a railgun that stretched the length of the ship as well as clusters of missile launchers and beam weapons in the weapons pods.

  "She put a tungsten slug the size of a groundcar through the bridge," someone was saying in a shaky, wavering voice. Part of my mind that had been paying attention put a name to him: he was an enlisted man, a Technician Third Class named Gutierrez. He and a Tech-2 named Andres had been the only ones in the Auxiliary Bridge. "I saw it coming. I called for Commander Shuff, but he was in Engineering when..."

  "So, we're it," I heard Daniela declare flatly. "There isn't anyone else."

  "We're it," Mat confirmed. He pointed at the screen. A small vessel was separating from a recessed niche in the side of the Tahni corvette, light flaring at its rear as it began to accelerate. "And they're coming."

  Chapter Eight

  "This is a fucking warship," Deke muttered. "How can there not be any guns on a fucking warship? I mean, seriously, we're in a war and this is a warship and there's no fucking guns..."

  I looked across at him from where I was wedged into a gap between the hull and one of the docking collars inside the Thatcher's tiny hangar bay, and sighed.

  "There's no fucking guns for the same reason there weren't any the last five times you've bitched about it," I said tiredly. "The same reason the ship's weapons pods aren't armed. Because they don't trust a bunch of dumbass cadets with live weapons." I gestured with the cutting laser I was awkwardly holding onto. "We're lucky we have these things."

  I saw him glance backwards, as if he could see the approaching Tahni boarding shuttle through the docking collar machinery. "I can't believe we're actually going through with this shit. It's suicide."

  "And you have a better idea?" I asked sharply. "If we'd tried to use the shuttle," I jerked a thumb towards where the ship's lone aerospace shuttle was nestled in the only full docking slot of the four that lined either side of the bay, "the Tahni corvette would have put a tungsten slug up our ass."

  I realized even as I was saying the words that I was being pretty sharp with Deke, but I could feel my gut doing back flips, and it wasn't just from the lack of gravity. Mat had sprung this plan on us within a few seconds of seeing the boarding craft heading our way, and we'd barely had time to find the cutting lasers and get out the airlock and into position before they arrived in the hangar bay. Now, with a couple minutes to think, I could feel the fear settling in like a frost.

  I was very likely about to die in the next few minutes. Maybe my parents would get the notification and maybe they wouldn't. Rachel might never know or even care what had happened to me. Nothing I'd ever done would matter to anyone. Well, maybe Jason. I'd called him a few times over the last two years, but he'd been commissioned as an Intelligence specialist after some in-depth testing following basic training and his studies were intensive and time-consuming, and so was the Academy for me. Maybe he'd see the casualty report and curse and get choked up for a minute. Maybe he could make sure my mom found out.

  I blew a breath out through my lips and tried to concentrate as I saw the nose of the Tahni boarding craft slide into the bay beneath me. Their shuttle was basically a lifting body shape like the ones we'd studied in aeronautics class---different cultures and histories didn't trump
the laws of physics. It was light grey on the underside and camouflaged with green and brown streaks on the top, with some subdued markings in the Tahni language on the side of one of the wings.

  I couldn't see the shuttle's vacuum lock on the starboard side as it was up against the docking collar and I was facing its port; but what I could see was the wider, oval hatch on the port side behind the cockpit. It was used planetside to disembark troops or equipment, that's what the files we had on them said. Deke and I were going to try to put it to another use today.

  We couldn't hear anything in the vacuum of the hangar bay, but I felt the vibration through the surface of the hull as the shuttle's airlock mated with the docking collar, the universal iris of the boarding craft's lock contracting to match its diameter. Now we just had to wait and hope that Mat and the others could draw them all out of the shuttle...because we had no way of knowing, with no communications.

  I touched a control on the side of my 'link where it was mounted on the bracket on the outside of my left wrist and saw a countdown begin on its display. Five minutes. I met Deke's eyes through the slit of his helmet and saw him roll his eyes slightly and shake his head. He didn't want to talk and I didn't blame him; I doubted the Tahni could pick up the line-of-sight signal from our 'links, but why take a chance?

  I heard my own breath loud in my ears, the only sound in a universe of silence, and it began to grate on my nerves as the seconds slowly ticked by. I thought only half-seriously about telling my 'link to play a song that lasted the rest of the five minutes, but instantly reconsidered. If I did die, I didn't want to spend eternity with the latest pop song stuck in my head. Then I found myself humming something anyway---something from one of those weird, retro bands Deke liked. I liked them because they used actual, physical instruments the way we did on Canaan. I don't care how sophisticated the simulation, no computer-generated note sounds exactly the way it does from an actual instrument. Jason told me more than once that's all psychological, that computer analysis has shown no difference between them at all, and I always said "yeah, according to a computer."

  I had been so wrapped up in my thoughts, I started in surprise when the timer on my 'link beeped into my earbud that the five minutes was up. I waved a hand at Deke, then pushed out of the little alcove where we'd been concealed and floated across the small bay to the side of the Tahni shuttle. I twisted around midway there and caught the hull of the boat with the sticky plate of my right boot, then turned to make sure Deke had managed to get a purchase on the hull next to me. He gave me a thumbs-up and we both knelt down along the curve of the hatch and brought around our industrial laser cutters.

  They'd been in the ship's machine shop, stored there to make field-expedient repairs, but they'd do nicely to slice through the seal of the hatch. And if any of the Tahni were still inside, they'd shoot us out of hand. I took a deep breath and triggered the laser. The beam was invisible of course, but its effect on the hatch seal was not: a dazzling white flare of igniting metal rose as the powerful but short-ranged laser burned through the hatch seals and vaporized the metal around them.

  We'd started out right next to each other at the top of the hatch and moved in opposite directions, downward towards the belly of the shuttle. After we'd reached the midway point, I could see a spray of fog emerging from the gaps in the hatch seal as the atmosphere inside the shuttle escaped and began to freeze into ice crystals, and the detached part of the hatch began to bend outward from the pressure. As we reached the bottom curve, it seemed ready to give, so I signaled to Deke to cut his torch, and I shut mine off as well; then we both braced our sticky plates against the hull, grabbed the upper part of the two-meter-tall and meter-wide hatch and began pulling it downward. The last strip of sealing carbon gave way and the heavy metal door began spiraling away across the bay, careening off the far bulkhead and then scraping across the deck as it gradually bled its momentum to friction and turned slowly in place, drifting slowly towards the bay entrance.

  Deke and I both brought our laser cutters up defensively and pulled ourselves through the opening. The shuttle was empty. A dozen acceleration couches stretched back through the cargo compartment unoccupied, with three more in the cockpit. That meant that Mat and the others would be dealing with as many as fifteen of the Tahni, all of them armed.

  "Shit," I muttered.

  "Go help them," Deke said over our 'links. I looked over at him and he waved towards the open airlock. "Go. I got this part."

  He held out his laser cutter to me and I took it, holding one of the massive makeshift weapons in each hand.

  "All right," I said. "Be careful."

  He laughed at that. "Bud, you're the one running headlong into the enemy with a pair of machine tools, eh?"

  I nodded to him, then turned and headed through the lock. I knew the general plan was for them to try to lead the Tahni back towards Engineering, as far away from the hangar bay as they could get, to give us more time, so I ignored the open and empty utility bay that stretched around the outside of the airlocks and went straight for the Central Access Tunnel. There was something floating in the air there just in front of the open hatch, some kind of particulate I thought at first, being twisted around in a regular pattern by the air currents. I was two meters away when I realized that it was liquid. Crimson globules of liquid floating around in that complex ballet, impacting and merging and splitting again in the air currents. I was a meter away when I figured out that it was blood.

  I tried too late to step around it, but walking was awkward with the sticky plates, and I saw a couple of the little orbs of red spatter against the armor over my chest. I tried not to think about where---and from whom---the red stains had originated, tried to make myself focus. But I kept wondering, why had they bothered to board us? They could have destroyed the ship with a couple more shots from their railgun. All I could figure was that they wanted live prisoners for interrogation. There was a thought to make your balls shrivel: captured and taken back to one of their bases, or even to Tahn-Skyyiah itself, drugged and tortured and wrung out until there was nothing more they wanted from you.

  Death didn't seem so bad by comparison. I let one of the lasers float in place, grabbed the hatch to steady myself and risked a look over the edge of it, down into the tunnel. There was a Tahni trooper right next to it, facing the other direction, and I jerked back reflexively.

  "Fuck," I said inside my helmet, trying to control my breathing. This, I repeated to myself, was why I was here.

  I lunged back over the edge of the hatch, put the cutter a few centimeters from the center of the Tahni's back and touched the actuator. The thing would cut through the armor of a shuttle in minutes; it sliced through the armor of his suit in a fraction of a second, and right through his spine in even less time. Vaporized metal mixed with vaporized blood in a cloud of steam that sent him lurching forward limply and I cursed, trying to reach for him before he floated off.

  I managed to snag his boot and pull him back through the hatch far enough to get hold of his weapon. It was, I remembered from a recognition class we'd had last summer, a compact laser carbine; it was unlike our laser weapons in that it fed from quick-burnout power crystals instead of pulsing hyperexplosive cartridges through a lasing rod, and the spare magazines were cylinders that popped into the side of the gun...somehow.

  At least I recalled where the safety catch and the trigger button were, and at least they didn't use any funky biometric security for their guns the way some Commonwealth law enforcement agencies did. I used a utility knife to slice through the fiber sling that attached the laser to his chest and then grabbed a couple of spare cylinders of crystals and stuffed them in one of my suit's exterior pockets on the off chance I could figure out how to reload it. The grip was oddly shaped, being constructed for a humanoid with more joints in their fingers than we had, but I could manage.

  I left the laser cutters behind and pushed the corpse of the Tahni away from me, finally sparing a second to look at it. His arm
or was bulkier than mine, but he was obviously taller than me and nearly as broad, and there was a wrongness to the way his joints fit together that made me shudder. He was definitely dead though: the laser had burned a fist-sized hole through the front of his armor and no more blood was pumping out of it. All the blood had vaporized. I was glad I couldn't see his face through his helmet's darkened visor.

  You just killed someone, a little voice whispered into the back of my mind like a tickle. You took a life.

  "You bet your ass," I snapped back at it. "And I'm not done yet, either."

  I eeled back through the hatch and then pushed off, soaring down into the bowels of the ship, towards Engineering. The tunnel seemed more narrowly claustrophobic than ever to me, a death trap where the shot that killed me could come from any of the hatchways that loomed the entire length of the vessel. I took a moment to stop at each of them and listen, using the external speakers fitted into my helmet since the ship still had atmosphere, though it was getting a bit stale at the moment. I heard nothing, saw nothing at any of them and I cursed the time I was wasting, but I wouldn't do my friends any good by getting careless and leaving an enemy trooper behind us.

  Well actually, I did see something: I saw more blood, a thin trail of it twisting in the air currents of the tunnel like a DNA double-helix, leading me straight back towards Engineering. No, I decided as I neared the end of the tunnel, not towards Engineering but towards the deck with the Auxiliary Bridge.

  I nodded to myself. Engineering was sealed tight and there was nowhere else to go with the seals in place. On Deck Four, there were at least half a dozen compartments, including the medical bay, where our people could hide and try to strike at the Tahni. I approached the hatch there cautiously, thinking the Tahni might have left someone back to guard it against us trying to sneak back behind them. I let my hand scrape against the roughened strip on the tunnel's interior, slowing down to a crawl, and that's when I heard the shots. Tahni lasers made a slightly different sound than ours did when fired, or so we'd been told. We were scheduled to do a familiarization fire with them the next semester, but I was getting that class early.