2166 - FORCE LIBERTY by Bloom A.D

Author:Bloom, A.D. [Bloom, A.D.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

8

SCS Taipan

She felt the small detonations, but Captain Sellis didn't know what had happened until the runner found her at the starboard barricade on B-deck. The railgunner who brought the news breathed so much condensation on her visor that Dana couldn't see her below her nose at first. The eyes said it was good news.

"Captain! We captured one!" When she shined her helmet lights the runner's way, she could discern the grin on her crewman's face. "We got one of them alive. A whole squad of 'em gambled they could come up through the deck from the mess hall without us being wise, but the Commodore's wife spotted 'em coming. Once the deck dropped out from the middle of the compartment they jumped up like giant grasshoppers and we got 'em in a ten gun crossfire. Most fell back through and then we fragged them, but we got to keep a live one. Mostly alive, anyway."

It took her less than a minute to get there. She ran out of the B-deck ring and into the tank room where the two-meter, hot-edged hole steamed in the deck from the water running over it. "Tanks got shot up, sorry." Marnes said, "We didn't hit the H3 tanks." The H3 tanks were on the other side and the two squads she saw on either side of the compartment had peppered the water tanks instead when their crossfire shredded the aliens.

Parts of the Shediri soldiers were strewn at the edges of the open section between the tanks that hadn't dropped through to the deck below. The black and white, dazzle painted limbs twitched with residual nervous system impulses, one of them with a weapon still in its insectile half-claws. "Secure that."

"Most of the bodies fell back down the hole," Marnes said. He pulled an egg-sized grenade from the thigh pocket of his exosuit. "Grenade out!" He twisted the halves in opposite directions and tossed it down the hole. The explosion threw bug parts up from below.

"Where are the prisoners?" The hissing and clacking she now heard coming out the exosuit speakers of a Shediri soldier didn't come from down there. The alien sounds came from the back of the compartment, back between the H3 tanks against the aft-most bulkhead.

"It's restrained," Marnes said, but Dana was already following the sound, and when she saw Margo Devlin, she knew something bad was happening.

It had barely been five minutes since it had been captured and somehow, Ram's wife had gotten Ostrow and Stefani to turn their backs and not watch what was happening. They spun around the second they saw Dana.

The redsuits had bound the Shediri in holene forming tape. After it expanded, the thing was half cocooned in a shell of 3cm-thick plastic around its upper and lower limbs. Over it, stood the boy.

Devlin's eight-year-old son had that plasma blade in his hand. The back half of the 15 cm, magnetically focused blade of thirteen-thousand degree plasma glowed bright and lit his face through his little helmet.

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