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[Republic Commando] - 02(19)

By:Karen Traviss


But there weren’t many places to run on an L-6 freighter. It was a cockpit and a couple of cabins bolted to a durasteel box of nothing. Atin moved ahead and simply opened up with the Deece’s new PEP laser, knocking two men flat in a massive shock wave of sound and light as they came out of the starboard cabin firing blasters.

Fi’s anti-flash visor darkened instantly. Even with armor, he felt the shock of the PEP’S unleashed energy. They all did.

Fi ran on over Atin as he dropped to one knee to cuff and search the men, wrists to ankles, as they lay struggling for breath, whimpering. A PEP round was like being flash-banged and hit in the chest by several plastoid rounds at once.

It was usually nonlethal. Usually.

Two down, three-maybe-to go.

The cockpit doors didn’t open when Niner stood back and hit the controls. Atin caught up with Fi again and they stood catching their breath.

Niner motioned Darman into position at the cockpit doors. “Shame that PEP doesn’t work through bulkheads.”

“Confirmed, three still inside,” Darman said, running the infrared sensor sweep in his gauntlet up and down the seam of the doors. “Nothing in the port cabin.”

Intel had it right for once: there were five bandits on board.

“Encourage them to step outside, Dar,” Niner said, checking his Deece’s PEP setting. He peered at the power readout. “This thing actually scares me.”

Darman unrolled a ribbon of adhesive thermal charge and pressed it around the doors’ weak points. Then he pushed the det into the soft material and cocked his head to one side as if calculating. “All that fuss getting in and now we just walk over them. Anticlimactic, I think the word is . .”

There was a dull echoing thud and screech of metal that vibrated through the deck. For a second Fi thought the det had gone off prematurely and that it was all a trick of his adrenaline-distorted perception, and that he was dead but didn’t know it yet.

But it wasn’t the det.

Fi looked at Niner, and Niner looked at Atin, and Fi saw in Darman’s viewpoint icon that he was staring at a fragment of flimsi that whipped past him as if snatched by a sudden wind.

It was being carried on a stream of air. Escaping air. Fi felt it grab him and they all reached instinctively for a secure point to anchor them.

“Hull breach,” Fi said, arms tight around a stanchion. “Check suit seals.”

They went into an automatic and long-drilled check of their suit systems. Katarn armor was vacuumproofed. Fi’s glove sensor confirmed his suit was still airtight and the thumbs-up from the rest of the squad indicated that their suit integrity was holding up too. The temporary gale of escaping air was abating.

“Sicko, you receiving?” said Niner.

Fi had the same thought, and judging by the rapid breathing on the shared comlink, so had Atin and Darman. The decompression was via the hatch. And that meant the seal formed by the TIV had been breached.

On their comlink there was only faint static and the sound of their own breathing and swallowing.

“Fierfek,” Atin said. “Whatever it is, he’s gone.”

Niner motioned Darman to stay by the cockpit hatch and beckoned Fi to follow him. “Let’s see if it’s fixable. You two stay there.”

“Well, we’ve probably lost two prisoners now,” Darman said. “Better make sure we haven’t lost the rest.”

There was no telling what had dislodged the TIV and whether they were going to meet someone boarding to deal with them. They made their way back up the passage to the entry hatch, DC-17s raised, and there was no sign of the two prisoners they’d left cuffed, nor anybody else.

And the hatch-about two meters by two-was wide open, star-speckled void visible beyond.

Fi gripped the rail on one side of it and leaned out a little. It was a good way to get your head blown off but he decided that the urgency of the situation warranted it.

There was no sign of the TIV. There was no sign of anything. He pulled himself back inboard. At least the gravity was still functioning.

Niner checked the environment sensors on his forearm plate. “Atmosphere’s fully vented now.”

“They have to have a foam system in these things.”

“Yeah, but if you had us running around your vessel, would you seal the hull and help us out?”

“Is the cockpit airtight?” Fi asked.

“We won’t know for sure until they go cold and we can’t pick them up in the infrared.” Niner switched on his tactical spotlamp and began searching the bulkhead for panels. “And by that time we’ll be ice cubes ourselves.”

Katarn armor-even the Mark III version-was only good against vacuum for twenty minutes without a backup air supply. And they hadn’t counted on being exposed that long.