“This sucks,” I said, making Ledbetter smile.

  “I can see you’ve got your head wrapped around the situation now.”

  Red Company wasn’t headquartered anywhere close to Borag’s bridge, but we did have an operations room where we could plan and witness events that were occurring outside the ship’s thick hull in the cold vastness of space.

  The three pirate spaceships were closing in fast, their engines flaring brightly as they pursued Borag through the vast emptiness of space. I could see the black silhouettes of the enemy ships growing larger and more menacing with each passing moment.

  As the ship’s executive officer, Commander Kaine barked out orders, his voice ringing out over the intercom. The crew sprang into action, racing to their battle stations and preparing for the inevitable boarding parties that would follow.

  The marines of Red Company were particularly focused, their eyes sharp and their movements precise as they loaded their weapons and checked their gear. They knew that their skills and training would be put to the test, and they were ready to meet the challenge.

  As the pirate ships closed in, I could see their weapon turrets rotating, targeting Borag with deadly accuracy. Captain Hansen calmly directed the ship’s evasive maneuvers, her experience and skill evident as she navigated through the dangerous debris of the asteroid belt.

  The chase was intense, with the pirate ships drawing ever closer to Borag. The crew worked together with a sense of urgency and purpose, each member playing their part in the frantic race to escape.

  Finally, the pirates drew so close to Borag, Captain Hansen had to turn the ship about to bring her weapons to bear.

  “That’s it!” Cox said. “Feel that under your feet? She’s swinging this big tub around. It’s three dogs on one big bear now.”

  I did feel it. The big ship turned, and everything turned with her.

  “Why are we turning around?” I asked, confused and little bit worried.

  Cox glanced at me. “Because you can’t shoot cannons out of your ass—at least, this ship can’t. We’ve got only two guns on our fantail, and they aren’t meant to do much more than knock out an incoming missile.”

  I gritted my teeth. Had it really come down to this? Had I worked so hard to escape drudgery, only to be blown up by pirates and a stubborn captain?

  As I was considered the greenest of recruits, I’d been given the less than critical task of cleaning off the screens and taking out the trash in the ops chamber. The job would have been as humiliating as Corporal Tench meant it to be if I hadn’t still been ecstatic about having escaped the ranks of the rock-rats. At least playing the office-boy in the ops chamber allowed me to watch the battle unfold.

  Only a few members of Red Company were in ops at that moment, when the fateful call came in. On every viewscreen aboard the big ship, the image of a rat-faced pirate with elongated features filled the display. His beady eyes darted about, scanning the ship with a calculating gaze, while his thin lips curled into a sly, sinister grin.

  “Corporate pig, Borag,” his voice grated. “You will brake and prepare to be boarded.”

  The pirate wore a patchwork of mismatched armor, each piece scavenged from a different source and crudely welded together. His helmet had been modified to allow his elongated snout to protrude, giving him the appearance of a twisted rodent. Had he been mutated by radiation, or some accident? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care.

  Despite his grotesque appearance, there was a dangerous intelligence in his eyes, a sense of cunning that made it clear he was not to be underestimated. His fingers were long and slender, ending in sharp nails that glinted in the dim light.

  As he spoke, his voice was low and gravelly, tinged with a hint of sadistic pleasure at the prospect of having caught up with Borag. It was clear that this rat-faced pirate was every bit as ruthless and cunning as he was ugly.

  “There will be no boarding of my ship,” Captain Hansen said firmly. “That is out of the question.”

  The rat-pirate looked surprised. He lifted his long fingers and began to count on them, slowly folding up digits until he held up three of them.

  “Have my eyes or my ears failed me?” he asked. “I see three wolves standing over one fat pig. How can these numbers be lying?”

  He had an odd accent, one that came from the far reaches of the Solar System. Way out here, isolated from the rest of humanity, men like him had developed their own mannerisms and habits of speech.

  “Our battle computers predict we can destroy two of you—but probably not three,” Captain Hansen said. “That is the only reason you’ve not yet been destroyed.”

  Sergeant Cox laughed at that. “She’s bluffing,” he told the others. “She’s good, isn’t she boys?”

  The others in the room flickered smiles back at him, including me. I wasn’t so happy to hear that her words were a bluff.

  The rat-man had a different reaction. He lifted his misshapen lip a fraction—the beginnings of a snarl. “This is no matter of debate, Captain. You will surrender your ship and cargo, or you will be destroyed. Prepare to be boarded. If you fire upon us, we will return fire, and the destruction of all our vessels will be assured.”

  The screen went dark, then the exterior view returned to focus. True to their word, the three pirate vessels split apart and began to close with Borag from three different trajectories.

  That image soon faded, to be replaced by a worried face. It was Captain Hansen. “All hands, this is your captain speaking.” All over the ship, we could hear her voice echoing loudly in every passageway. “We’re about to be faced with boarders. We can and will resist this attempt to capture my ship.”

  “Oh shit…” Cox said. All humor had drained from his face. “Hansen’s bluff has been called, and she’s going for it!”

  We all exchanged worried glances.

  “Green Company will stand at the airlocks,” Captain Hansen continued, “they’ll try to burn their way in there first. Red Company will deploy to defend Engineering and the Bridge. Hansen out.”

  Green Company consisted of all the security forces that weren’t marines. All over the ship, every foreman and passage-cop was issued a pistol from the armory and sent racing to the airlocks. There were three main airlocks, plus the big doors that led into the cargo hold.

  “This is crazy,” Corporal Tench said. “They might come at us from three directions at once! Why doesn’t she just blast them out of space?”

  “Because that would be suicide,” the Commander Kaine answered as he stepped onto the deck. We all wheeled and saluted him. “As long as we don’t fire our cannons, they won’t either. They want our ore and maybe our vessel, they don’t want to destroy everything.”

  “But sir,” Tench had the pluck to ask, “if we do beat them back from our decks, won’t they just blast us out of space anyway—at point blank range?”

  “Have faith in your officers, Corporal. Praying wouldn’t hurt, either. Now Cox, I’m taking over this ops center. You’ll deploy your squad on the bridge. If the enemy does breach one of our defensive lines at the airlocks, be prepared to rush to that deck and push them back.”

  “Sir, yes sir!” Sergeant Cox responded. He hustled for the door, and those of us from his squad followed close behind.

  As I moved to follow Sergeant Cox and his squad, Corporal Tench glared at me and dared to put a hand in my path. “What about the greenie? Shouldn’t we leave him here at ops? He can shine Kaine’s shoes or something.”

  Cox hesitated, but only for a few seconds. He shook his head. “No. The commander’s orders were clear. Quit bitching about Starn, he’ll do okay.”

  We followed Cox into the passages. We checked our rifles and closed our helmets. If the ship suddenly lost pressure, a sealed suit would keep us breathing.

  Corporal Tench grabbed my shoulder. My instinct was to shake him off, but I didn’t.

  “Don’t screw this up, Starn,” he said. “If you do, if you shoot just one of my men in the ass by accident, I will throw you out of an airlock without compunction.”

  I didn’t answer him. I just glared back for a moment. Then he moved off.

  I wasn’t really rattled by his threats. After all, I’ve been a rock-rat for over a year now, and I’d received countless similar threats from the foreman. Hell, even my drill-bot was trying to kill me half the time. Corporal Tench was going to have to do better than that to scare me.

  Still, I couldn’t help but take his words under advisement. I was the least experienced man in this unit by far. If anybody was likely to accidentally get someone killed, it was me. Accordingly, I vowed to be careful with my aim.

  I’d never faced a real battle before, except for that one time fighting with the claim-jumpers. I hoped I wouldn’t freeze up or make a mistake. I steeled myself, telling myself to remember my last few weeks of training, and to keep my head no matter what happened.

  I found myself really wishing that this boarding action had come a year from now—or preferably not at all. I was scheduled for a full, proper bootcamp training back on Mars the next time we returned to port, but that simply wasn’t possible while spending months in deep space. For now, I was an emergency replacement and nothing more. I would have to do my best.

  With Sergeant Cox in the lead and Corporal Tench in the rear, we raced through the passages. We negotiated ladders and the clanging metal stairways, sometimes pulling ourselves through holes in the ceiling or wall using metal loops. The fact that our bodies weighed much less than they should helped us sail through the ship to our destination.

  “Move, Starn. Move!” I heard the corporal shout from behind me. He rammed me in the back with the butt of his rifle. “You’re lagging. Get a move on!”

  I might have turned on him angrily, but I knew he was right. My bulky, squat body, born and bred on Earth, was plenty strong, but it simply wasn’t as agile or as natural-moving in low gravity. The other troops were like fish in water by comparison. I did my best to hustle and to keep up.

  Chapter 6: The Bridge

  When we finally reached the bridge, we were allowed to slow down and spread out. We didn’t occupy the bridge itself, but rather the main passageway that led up to the ship’s critical nerve center.

  Borag’s bridge was a large, circular room with walls covered in blinking, flashing screens displaying various information about the ship’s status and the surrounding space. The room was dimly lit, with only a few small, circular lights casting eerie shadows across the faces of the crew. In the center of the room stood a raised platform where Captain Hansen and her top officers were stationed. The platform was surrounded by rows of consoles where crew members sat, monitoring the ship’s systems and preparing for battle. Everyone was tense and sweating as the crew waited for the inevitable pirate attack.

  The command deck officers eyed us coldly. Commander Kaine wasn’t there, of course. He was back in the Security Ops Center, handling the defense of the entire ship. I didn’t know the rest of the faces on the command deck. In fact, I’d never even seen the bridge before—not in person.

  Putting our backs up against the curved passageway walls, we marines tried to make ourselves as unobtrusive as possible. Ensigns and midshipmen flew back and forth past us, ignoring us, shouting to one another. It was as if they didn’t see us at all.

  We were here to provide a final defense should everything else go to hell. Until that moment came, we were just in the way.

  “Eyes front, Starn,” Cox said.

  I gave a guilty start, because I’d naturally been stealing glances into the command deck, taking a look around and seeing who was in there and what they were doing. They all seemed very professional, focused and worried.

  I turned my helmeted head and stared at Private Ledbetter instead, who was directly across the passageway from me.

  The private stared back. His face was almost emotionless. I don’t think he was really looking at me. He was thinking about what was coming next.

  I decided to listen as best I could, rather than stare.

  “Keep those gun ports open but the turrets retracted,” Captain Hansen said.

  She proceeded after that to make quite a few references to our main armament, which consisted of several cannons.

  Was she planning on firing? Or was she simply making sure the big guns did not threaten the pirates so greatly, that they got spooked and decided to fire first?

  Space combat at point-blank range like this was highly lethal. In space, everything was about range, especially effective range. If a given target was only a few miles away from the weapon that was aiming at it, or better yet, just a few feet off your bow, hitting that target was a virtual certainty. But normally, ships were nowhere near so close to one another. And therefore, targeting was nowhere near as certain. Missiles could home in of course, but while they were in flight, there were obvious means for countermeasures. Guns and cannons, especially ones that shot in a straight line without any intelligent guidance, were highly inaccurate when shooting at moving targets over great distances. But now, the pirates and Borag were right on top of each other. There was no way anyone could miss.

  “What’s the response time?” Captain Hansen demanded. “What’s their calculated response time? I want a number.”

  I could hear some people working screens. I could hear the computers quietly rattling out answers in fake voices.

  “We’re really not familiar with this raider design, sir,” answered another officer, “not enough to make tight predictions like that. We have to assume their software is up to date, that their sensors and their AI is of a quality build. I would say the answer is unknown. If we fire right now, we may or may not inflict enough catastrophic damage to their systems to prevent them from retaliating and destroying us in turn.”

  “Give me a firing solution, Lieutenant,” Captain Hansen said. “I’ll make the decision.”

  “Holy shit,” I heard one of our men whisper. “She’s going to do it.” He was obviously listening in to this conversation, the same as I was.

  Glancing up and down the line of marines that were pressed up against the walls of the passageways, I saw a lot of pale faces. The men were swallowing inside their helmets with their eyes shut. One or two of them even seemed to be mumbling prayers to themselves.

  Even I, a lowly rock-rat recently transformed into a marine, knew that Captain Hansen was contemplating the unthinkable: an ambush at point-blank range.

  The situation was a standoff, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I was a kid back on Earth. In those days it had been gangsters pressing pistols into one another’s bellies, each daring the other to fire. It was a game of chicken, of mutually assured destruction. Both sides were likely to die if either fired—but still, both were tempted. A surprise strike, perhaps in the moment of your opponent’s distraction, could hand you an instant victory.

  The trouble here was that we weren’t talking about men facing one another, but rather computers. A smart battle computer operating a ship—any ship, even a raider—was scripted to automatically return fire when it sensed it had been fired upon. Even if one side ambushed the other, and every warhead struck home, there was no guarantee that some independent turret wouldn’t lock on and fire back, even as the target ship died.

  “What about missiles?” Captain Hansen demanded. “Dammit, give me all the numbers on the missiles!”

  “There’s no way we’re going to win with a surprise missile strike, Captain,” the weapons officer reported. “We’re going to have to ride out this boarding assault and hope our marines can hold them. I don’t think we have any choice.”

  “I don’t want to hear your opinions, Lieutenant,” Captain Hansen snapped. “I want to hear some facts. Tell me why the missiles won’t work.”

  “It’s a matter of range, sir. They’re in too close now. We don’t have any missiles loaded with low-yield warheads. A missile strike would destroy everything for a mile around—including us.”

  “Dammit!” Captain Hansen said. “We waited too long.”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so,” the lieutenant replied. “Missiles just aren’t an effective option. Not once we were within effective cannon range. Once you fire missiles, everybody knows about it. Compared to our cannons, they would give the enemy’s computers a lot longer response time before they ever got hit. Again, we should have been destroyed.”

  “All right then,” she said, defeated. “It’s all up to the marines. Stand down the missiles. Keep our gun ports open, but don’t even let those turrets twitch. There’s no point in setting this thing off unless we have to.”

  There was a lot of hustling and talk on the bridge after that. Everyone was breathing again. I felt both relieved and concerned. We weren’t about to blow up—but there was some hard fighting in my near future.

  “Crew,” Hansen said a minute or so later, “let it be known: I have no intention of allowing any top-tier officers to be traded away to these rodents as slaves. You can set your minds at ease about that.”

  Ledbetter and I exchanged glances at that. We were both listening in—all the marines in the passageway outside the bridge had heard it. It was impossible not to. The captain had a microphone attached to her helmet, and when she keyed it and made a statement to everyone on the bridge, it was boomingly loud.

  The critical point, the point that was sinking in for both Private Ledbetter and me, was that Captain Hansen had made a promise to her upper echelon officers. She had said nothing about the lowly enlisted, or the pathetic indentured contracts that worked on the lower decks. Could it be she was already considering trading away such assets on Borag’s balance sheets in order to buy off these pirates?

  It wasn’t unthinkable. It had happened before.

  At that moment, as if she’d suddenly realized what she was saying and who might be listening in, Captain Hansen ordered that the big, round doorway that led to the bridge to be closed. The heavy portal clanged shut, and thick bolts shot into the bulkhead, locking it. After that, we couldn’t hear anything more from the officers and their fateful planning.