War Fleet: Resistance, стр. 30
“Keep firing. Hold your position here until I’m back.” She punched open the sickbay door.
Redrock stood stooped over the bed, holding a pistol. The auto-administering IV lay toppled onto the floor. He looked kind of bleary-eyed, and swayed from side to side. There was no one else with him.
“What’s happening out there?” he slurred.
“No time to explain. Arstans have boarded. We need to get you out of here.”
Redrock stepped forward and almost fell on the floor — would have done, if Kota hadn’t lurched in to stop him. She let him use her as support as she led him back out into the corridor.
As she reached the two Marines behind the shields, a grenade came sailing through the air and landed between them.
Shit.
“Fall back,” she shouted.
Riley sprang to his feet and followed Kota’s, Redrock’s, and Turgin’s lead away from the grenade. But Singh was unloading a whole barrel full of slugs into an enemy Arstan’s chest. He didn’t finish his burst before the grenade exploded, sending him sprawling behind the Marines. He landed on the floor, a bloody ragdoll.
Kota moved forwards and checked the pulse at Singh’s neck. He hadn’t survived the blast. She didn’t even have time to close his eyes before heavy footsteps clanked from behind the heavy smoke from the grenade. But she did manage to pick up the dead Marine’s rifle and toss it to Redrock.
She considered turning off the magnetic flooring a moment to disorient the charging Arstans, but that might make matters worse, given how outnumbered they were. So she ordered the squad to fall back one more time.
The enemy was close, too close now. And the Arstans were pushing Kota’s squad nearer and nearer to the CIC. By the number of footsteps she could hear, she suspected there were more than she thought.
Beside her, Redrock looked like he’d sobered up a little. He wasn’t swaying anymore, and he had Singh’s rifle in his hand, pointed straight at the enemy. Now, at least, he was fighting.
Good. One thing was for sure — Kota would rather she, Redrock, and her squad die fighting these beasts than be taken captive by them, any day.
33
Ensign Chang sat against the cold bulkhead of the engine room and stared defiantly at the FTL-warp engine. His hands shook, and his uniform was drenched in cold sweat. He had given himself five minutes to fix things. Five minutes to get them out of here before the Arstans overwhelmed them all.
But part of him wondered if fixing the engine would help. Even if he FTL-warped them to another location — the Arstans would surely take over the ship and bring them back again. From what Chang could hear, it didn’t sound like they were winning. Part of him was asking himself: was there really any point? Soon enough, the Arstans would force their way in and shoot him, and then his work would be undone.
Back home, in Mississippi on Earth, his mother had told him she didn’t think the military was good for him. There was no use risking his talent, she’d told him. If he died, it would all be wasted. Instead, she’d wanted him to get his doctorate and someday become a tenured professor. To be sure, if he’d worked in a university, he wouldn’t have had this kind of crazy pressure, where the lives of every crew member on the ship depended on him.
Chang clenched his fists. That was it — the lives of the entire crew here depended on him. He brought his mind back to the present moment, and focused on the task at hand.
He’d already hacked the lock, so nothing could get in without blasting through. The only way to open the door was to scan the private barcode he’d created on his wristwatch. He’d generated the numbers from memory, so no Arstan could find any hidden codes lying around or anything like that.
Chang stood up and crouched down next to the FTL-warp engine. On the surface, it looked like a box with a cylinder leading out from it into space. He opened the hatch on the top of the box and examined the inside through the safety glass. The plasma cannon that had hit it hadn’t punched a hole through to space, but the heat had melted one of the sixteen cylinders so that a gash opened up into the nitrous-oxide cooling system that connected the rest of the engines on the ship.
Chang took a deep breath. There was a leak, and he couldn’t fire up the FTL-warp without frying every engine on this ship. Not just that, but the cooling system wasn’t shielded against explosives. He’d have to lock off this room; otherwise the whole ship would get destroyed during the jump. Even then, once they FTL-warped, the ship would never fly again.
So much for becoming an engineer to fix things.
The gunfire outside seemed to be getting louder and more frequent. The Arstans would get here soon, but he felt like he had no other choice. For a moment he considered contacting Captain Olsen on the channel he’d kept open and asking for his feedback, but if the Arstans had overtaken the bridge, he might reveal their location. Better he operated under their radar.
He moved to the side of the box and opened the electrical panel. It only needed a little rewiring to circumvent the safety mechanism. After that, he could program in the warp coordinates directly on the panel on the side of the engine. No one ever seemed to acknowledge it, but engineers were among the most powerful people on any ship in service.
Chang gritted his teeth, clipped a grounding cable to his sleeve, and got to work. As he worked, he tried to ignore the sound of gunfire outside and the nagging voice of his mother in his head, telling him he would have had a better life as an academic.
34
Kota, Redrock, Turgin, and Riley made their last stand against the Arstans right in front