Stone Breaker by Andrew Beery

Author:Andrew Beery [Beery, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-01-22T22:00:00+00:00

***

“OK, boys and gals… it’s party time,” I barked over our Stark suit comms. There were about twenty of us on the exterior hull of the Yorktown. We were approaching the breaching pod. It looked like a massive bullet embedded halfway into the ship.

An equal number of my marines were under the command of Lieutenant Hammond. This last group was supporting Commander First who was coordinating his attack with ours. The hope was that by hitting them from two sizes at once… their response would be chaotic and ineffective.

My team’s plan was to blow a small, marine-sized, hole in the hull of the Yorktown and charge the defenders. It was a simple plan. It seems, unfortunately, that it’s the simple ones that are the ones that are most spectacular when they go south for the winter.

As soon as Sergeant Peters had set the explosives, I had my men lock their magnetic tethers in place and signaled Peters to blow the hatch. Commander Ben had given us the thumbs up from his side.

What happened next was… in a word… spectacular… in a bad sort of way.

The hull ruptured as expected… and the air in the corridor flooded out of the breach. The moisture in it froze immediately and it looked like escaping stream. This was all per our plan… but the gasses continued to vent. I became worried that somehow, we were decompressing the entire ship… and then the color changed.

Rather than white frozen ice particulates… the venting gas now had a distinct reddish tint.

I looked at Peters. “Did you hit a plumbing line or something?”

“Not a chance, Sir. I scoped out this entire area before I set the charges.”

I toggled my comms. “Ben, are you seeing this?”

“Affirmative AG. I think you are sucking atmosphere and dust from whatever is on the other side of that portal.”

As if on cue several pieces of debris flew out of the hole Peters had created. I knew immediately that they were not from the Yorktown.

“Well, that can’t be good,” I muttered.

“We’ve got a problem AG,” Ben yelled over the comms.

“Ya think?”

“It’s worse than the little wind storm we’ve got going on. The Admiral just climbed through the ring-gate portal. I think she is trying to shut the gate down from the other side.”

“She’s what? Why didn’t you stop her?” I yelled.

What I didn’t realize was that Commander Ben was even now trying to reach Cat. He had had Yorky erect a containment field to protect the rest of the ship and had entered the dust-filled torrent.

This was the beginning of a hectic few weeks that were, ultimately, a distraction for an even bigger problem looming in our future. Let me take a few moments and summarize our situation. In the immortal words of my first Drill Sergeant, ‘if crap came in a basket… we would be the basket’.

The next several weeks were punctuated by a series of progressively worse misadventures. The first was the death of my friend, Commander Ben First. He had the

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