Chapter 40

Third Mission, outbound aboard the FUP Deep Space Exploration vessel Glenndeavor, 2401 CE

Crack! ... Crack! ... CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! I could hear the sound of high-energy laser bursts from the spiders coming from down the passageway, with returning fire coming from the Marines in the speeding TD2 just ahead of us. Anika, Beatrice, and I flew along no more than a meter-and-a-half behind the rear of their donk, our anti-grav boards 10 or 12 centimeters off the deck. Closed hatchways flashed by on our left and right as my inner geek recognized the Marines had their power settings so high I could hear their discharges as well.

"If we must fight forward—" announced Anika, her young voice still sounding calm in my ear bud as part of me noticed that the desert camo-colored pants directly in front of me in the driver's seat were covering the buttocks of a female Marine.

Crack! CRACK! Crack! CRACK! CRACK!

"—Bea, " Anika commanded as we continued to pick up speed along with the charging donk, "you fall back behind me to have field of fire to right if I go high. Jameson, you proceed along left side of TD to maintain cover. Let us be hitting what we aim at and hold beam weapons on 'gets until seeing results, yes? Bea, single shots, please."

CrackCRACK CrackCRACKCrackCRACK!

The rate of fire now sounded like a string of firecrackers going off. I guessed moving at high speed toward our targets was making it hard for the gunners and the spiders to make effective hits. I could see that guarding our rear was going to be our second priority unless the TD2 bypassed the spiders.

Crack! CRACK! CRACK!

Fuck it, I thought as a wild, savage joy rose up inside me. I cut my board to the left for a quick look ahead through my deployed visor. We were so close to the storage compartment I couldn't see the spiders near the right bulkhead. Suddenly the TD2 began rapidly decelerating and I pulled up beside it before I could lift my toe to slow down.

Not wanting to outrun my cover and shoot out in front of the donk, a big rush of more adrenaline pumped into my system. As I lifted my toe enough to bring my board to a halt, I sensed the motion behind me as much as heard over the laser fire a Marine jump out of the rear compartment and start around the back of the stopping TD2. For a moment, down in my lizard brain, I felt crazy excitement coming from both Anika and Beatrice through our connection!

There was an explosion ahead I couldn't see. The smoking, shattered shell of a spider smacked high against the left bulkhead five meters ahead.

Crack! Crack! Crack! CRACK! Crack! CRACK! CRACK!

In the top of my tinted vision a spider appeared—upside down and scurrying toward us in the center of the overhead, firing down on the donk from a small, moving opening in its shell. Vaporized haze blasted out of the cream-colored surface all around the thing as it zigzagged closer, its many moving metal legs making it look like some kind of murderous, nightmare crab.

Now I was near the front of the donk. I raised my arms, aimed the laser pistol and EMP gun with each trigger finger pointing along the barrel, my index fingers on the triggers. The spider continued to rake the TD2 as I exhaled. Both colored crosshairs centered on the spider as I eased back the triggers and held them down. There was a rainbow of colored flashes all over the armored shell of the spider.

BLAM! from my right.

"FUCKIN' 'ELL!" a male voice screamed from up in the compartment just above my Kilo. "MY HAND! MY HAND!"

I realized I was crouching down over my stationary board. The crosshair overlays remained on target. I fought the urge to apply more pressure on the triggers of my weapons, as if that would add more killing force to the beams.

A blast sounded from the other side of the donk and the spider violently somersaulted backward off the overhead, metal legs and fragments flipping off the dome tumbling through the air.

My fingers let up on the triggers as the spinning spider flew meters down the passageway and smacked onto the deck. The dented remains teetered to a stop, the shell upside down, smoke coming up from the exposed, gutted bottom. White-hot sparks jetted up into the air from the machine's innards, the spray of sparks growing full and shooting higher, then tapering off and dying out.

There were no more laser discharges in the corridor.

I could hear my own heavy breathing as I lowered my weapons. Working up a mouthful of spit, I swallowed, remembering I was still balanced on an anti-grav board. I realized my ribs didn't hurt any more where I'd been hit by that grenade shrapnel—not even a twinge. I was sure I'd get a 'tsk tsk' from the Med Tech who'd checked me out and restricted me from attending PT. However, what just happened made me very thankful for the extra Firing Range time the restriction gave me.

The Marine in the front-left compartment of the TD2 next to me was moaning. As I stood up on my board, I looked through the access opening. He was bent forward at a 45 degree angle in his bucket seat, clutching his hidden right hand to the chest of his turtle-shell armor. There were wisps of smoke curling off of three or four places on the front of his desert camo-colored vest. It didn't seem to me he was acting as if any of those hits had penetrated to his body.

A hot, metallic tang in the air made me wrinkle my nose; I also detected the smell of singed clothing. I realized the kack odor of burnt flesh was irritating the back of my throat. I noticed smoke rising from the exploded receiver of a laser rifle resting across the edge of the donk at the front of the wounded Marine's compartment.

Then slowly the TD2 started to move forward, taking the doubled-over Marine away from me. In the next compartment I saw the battle-decked sky warrior there starting to rise up from her bucket seat, looking around at the remaining bandleers in the other compartments as the machine continued rolling. The last compartment was empty. Picking up speed with a building hum, the donk drifted to the right as the rear of the machine passed me.

Slowly the driver was slipping, legs first, forward out of her seat as if she were boneless—her hands still on the joystick controllers at the front of each armrest. The driver's neck and head tilted back, I saw her shattered data visor pointed up at the overhead.

Gowno, my paranoid ass-wipe let out from my lizard brain, better her than us!

My earlier, momentary euphoria was gone, leaving me feeling slightly sickened at my PAW's comment as my body began reacting to the adrenaline slump and the stress.

I was alive.

From behind me, with her Kilo almost brushing the overhead, Anika accelerated her anti-grav board, heading for the steadily accelerating armored donk that would smack into the right bulkhead if it weren't stopped.

Following her flight with my eyes, I felt a rush of joy at seeing my younger wife whole and active. As she neared the moving donk, the torso of the driver slipped off the seat cushion, her arms held above her shoulders by the joystick on each armrest until the last. Finally free of the pressure, the joysticks returned to the neutral position and the humming quickly ceased, stopping the machine less than a meter from the bulkhead and halfway to the intersection another 30 meters down the passageway that joined this one from the rights.

Part of me wondered if the other fire team attacking down that passageway had taken out the spiders there. I didn't hear any firing and no spiders were swarming around the corner, so I figured they'd succeeded. To be sure, I glanced at my tactical threat overlay. I didn't see any red dots in the white outline representing that corridor, only five green and two blinking yellow dots, along with the green oblong of a TD. My inner geek informed me that the blinking yellow dots represented wounded.

I closed my eyes and immediately connected again with both Anika and Bea.

Anika's first concern was for the wounded as she landed her board on the top of the donk between the two empty personnel compartments along the left side of the machine. I switched my inner focus and felt Bea was surprised the conflict was over so fast. She was greatly impressed with not only the nifty anti-grav board, but also the way the assault shotgun, combined with the ammo she and Anika had loaded into the magazines, had blasted that last spider off the overhead and into pieces when nothing else seemed to stop it.

I opened my eyes and looked to my right. A few meters along the bulkhead, Bea was on her board with her back to me gazing down at the fancy street sweeper she held with both hands. Not far ahead of her, Corporal Grievous was looking at a helmet-sized square cut into the bulkhead plating, between the control panel and the hatch of the storage compartment. There was a single metallic spider leg hanging down from the bottom edge of the hole along with the severed ends of a wiring bundle that had been partially pulled out of the cut.

The rest of the destroyed spider was on the deck near the NCO's boots. There were three big holes I could see burned in the upright dome. The last spider was farther down from the compartment, upside down, its metallic legs drooping from the edges of the shell toward the deck.

The only good nightmare crab, my PAW said, is a DEAD nightmare crab!

"Jameson, Bea," Anika's young voice spoke into my right ear, "please be coming to help with our honored wounded—immediately."

With a shake of my helmeted head and just the thought of flying over to help her, my anti-grav board picked up speed and I carved air toward the stopped TD2, sensing Beatrice following along in my wake.

As I applied downward pressure with my trailing boot and the nose of the silently flying board lifted, I pictured landing on the top deck of the donk I was approaching.

My paranoid ass-wipe wondered why Corporal Grievous wasn't already over at the donk helping pull together her fire team and see to the wounded.

Perhaps, I thought as I remembered to holster first my hand laser and then the EMP gun, this isn't her fire team. The short NCO didn't strike me as that much of a team player, and I figured—from things she'd said at the chew-show and how they seemed to work together—that she was one of the assets Merch brought aboard with him at the start of this cruise.

There I was, with my boots out of the bindings of my board, kneeling on the front deck of the donk at the edge of the front two cubbyholes. With an aid kit by either pad-covered knee, I retrieved whatever Anika and Bea, or Corporal Kayama and Private Embry, asked for next. We were fortunate that the high-power lasers mounted in the spiders left wounds that were cauterized to some degree. Theoretically, there shouldn't be much blood if a wounded Marine didn't move around much after being hit. However, the Marines that were hit had moved around and had opened their wounds.

Corporal Grievous was more interested in what the spiders were after in the storage compartment than what had happened to the members of the fire team she'd led into the attack. She was still back at the closed storage compartment looking at the damage done by the spider that tried to break in.

The spider that had maneuvered up on the overhead negated the cover provided by the donk. As it attacked from above, the spider targeted the sky warriors in the armored surround of their personnel compartments. The spider got off one shot that cleared the ballistic plex protecting the PFC on the driving platform before Bea blew the TAWPS to smithereens. The result of that shot was tragic; there was nothing anyone could do for the driver. We were lucky the other spiders were destroyed on the deck.

The sky warrior in the front left seat with a smashed hand had already received a shot to ward off shock; he'd have to wait on a corpsman for further treatment. The young Private in the front right seat was suffering from two laser hits to his upper right arm and had other burn marks on his protective armor; my Polka Fireball and Bea were working on him. He'd complained of burning on his chest. Bea got his armor and his battle blouse opened, and then pulled up his olive tee shirt that showed several scorch marks. The chest pain was from first-degree burns that looked like bug bites before Nurse Beatrice covered each one with cream.

Corporal Kayama—it was her fire team—and Private Embry, who was very good at keeping the wounded distracted while they received care, had opened the turtle-shell vest and cut through the battle jacket and tee shirt of the Marine in the back right personnel compartment to reveal a left-shoulder wound where two hits to the same place had penetrated his armor—and his body.

After tossing a small spray bottle of antibiotic to Private Embry, I looked back down the passageway behind the TD2 at Grievous.

Now she was busy with a multi-tool, getting the small, emergency-access panel off the bulkhead to the left of the storage compartment hatch. My inner geek knew that once she had the panel removed she'd need a tool like an evacuation handlebar that each crewmember grabbed or hooked onto, or both, before sliding down an evac tube.

There was a socket in the middle block of the handlebar that would fit on the hardened nut in the center of the dogging-gear that Grievous was working to uncover. With the electronic controls damaged, using a tool such as that, the NCO could manually crank open the hatch to the storage compartment.

I had a compression bandage ready to toss back to Embry when I heard the echoing hum of a donk approaching from the adjoining corridor about 30 meters behind me. The sound of slightly squeaking clean tires on clean decking made my mind's eye picture the TD coming out of the joining corridor and turning toward us.

"Belay that bandage, G5, ah ... Sitwell," Corporal Kayama told me from where she leaned forward over the right shoulder of the wounded Marine sitting back in his bucket seat with his chest and his shoulder wound exposed. Embry was now kneeling in the compartment opening. I could just make out Kayama's eyes through the tinted visor of her POT helmet. My own visor was up, but I figured she left hers down to monitor her communications channels.

"The corpsmen were observing our work on Gryphakus," she told me and tapped on the side of her helmet with the fingers of her left hand. Then the visor went up into her POT as Private Embry climbed down off the side of the donk to the deck on my left. "They want to make sure the artery isn't compromised before he gets closed up, so no more pressure on it until they get here."

Kayama looked over her right shoulder in the direction of Corporal Grievous for a moment and then back, taking in Anika and Beatrice who, having finished bandaging the bicep wounds on their patient, were both sitting on the front ledge of the forward right personnel compartment next to me. Their wounded Marine was slumped back in his incredible bucket seat cradling his wounded right arm and with his eyes closed; his POT helmet was on the back edge of his compartment.

I saw Anika's street sweeper, its strap threaded through and over the top of the front handgrip of the first compartment opening to her left. Bea, now sitting next to me, had put the resulting loop of the strap around the end of the barrel, which was pointing up at the overhead near my younger wife's left leg. Then I noticed Anika's assault rifle was hanging from the other handgrip, the barrel up in the air in the same manner.

"I want to thank all three of you," said the Corporal, her oriental features were placid but I could see her appreciation and the concern in her brown eyes under the rim of her helmet, "for everything. That took some clusters, riding into battle on those boards like that. Where did you get them? And what kind of rounds are in that shotgun, G3 Henderson?"

The arriving TD2 pulled up beside us and stopped on my right, about three meters away. Two corpsmen, one really big and one small, and each with a big medical pack over their shoulder, climbed down from the front two compartments of the donk and conferred in front of the machine. Another Marine jumped down from the middle left cubbyhole and opened a tool locker panel between the two front compartments. He took out a dogging bar and trotted out from between the two parked vehicles heading for Corporal Grievous.

"I am Fireball, Corporal," Anika spoke up from the other side of Bea as I turned to look back at Kayama. "I am proud to be having chance to uphold with your brave fire team. These spiders are treacherous, yes? This is Death Dealer," she told the Marine, giving the kneepad on Bea's left knee a little shake with her hand. "And our helper ... his bandle is Sitz. These boards are our own, engineered and manufactured on the Federation planet of Nowe Gniezno—same for, ah, hunting rounds and shotgun."

One corpsman, the big Fleet Lieutenant with a florid complexion under his POT helmet, climbed up into the empty rear compartment next to the cubbyhole of the Marine with the shoulder wound.

"We'll take over from here, Corporal," he said in a deep, rumbling bass voice. "Good work."

I saw two other Marines heading to the back of the donk, one carrying a body bag.

"That means it's time for you to dismount and let us get on with our work," a female Fleet Warrant Officer said as she appeared in the opening to the personnel compartment immediately to my right. She smiled at Anika, Bea, and me. "Now would be soon enough. How are you, Marine?" she asked the guy in the bucket seat in front of her as she climbed up.

"It's my fuckin' hand, Chief," said the Marine with the smashed palm and burned fingers, still holding his hand against the front of his turtle-shell armor. "Blast it; everythin' went tawpsy-turvy on us. Those spiders just didn't want to die, let me tell yah."

I stood up on the top deck of the TD2, the overhead a full meter above me. Anika, and then Bea, climbed down from the donk, the nose of the machine angled toward the bulkhead only a meter away. Private Embry was standing near the rear of the machine as Corporal Kayama climbed down. Looking back, I saw my younger wife already had her assault rifle on the back of her matte-black vest.

As Beatrice lifted the shoulder strap off the barrel of the shotgun hung on the handgrip, I started to step down into the right cubbyhole. I was careful of the Marine's feet and his laser rifle angled up against the right back corner. I left the aid kits behind on the lip of the two front compartments; they belonged to the wounded Marines. I looked to my left. Our three boards were hovering just in front of the TD2 near the bulkhead.

My inner geek was pleased, even if the method Anika demonstrated to get our boards out of the way was showing off. A grin formed on my face as I turned around, grabbed both handholds now free of weapons, and climbed down backwards from the TD2.

I feel like a kid, I thought, with the most cohesive new toy ever.

Then I remembered the dead driver and the smell of burned flesh. I was thankful my paranoid ass-wipe was quiet. Feeling abashed, I turned to my left away from the donk and walked to Anika, Bea, Private Embry, and Corporal Kayama near the rear of the donk. Beyond them, I saw Corporal Grievous and the Marine who brought the tool to her, working together with the dogging bar. With another revolution of the bar, they finished cranking open the hatch to the storage compartment.

"And what, Fireball, do you hunt on that planet which requires shells like that?" asked Corporal Kayama, and gave a nod up to the overhead. "Not that I'm going to file a complaint. And please, call me Gojira, that's my bandle. Private Embry is Twofer. You three really earned it."

"Things we are wanting to kill, Gojira," Anika replied in a serious-sounding voice, "and that we are wanting to stay dead."

"I really like this street sweeper, Nika," Bea spoke up, looking down at the assault shotgun she held in her hands. I had my tactical gloves in the left thigh pocket of my duty blues; I wondered where Bea put hers when they started working on the wounded Marine.

"Excuse me—" said a Private coming up behind Embry and Kayama. He held the dogging bar at his side in his right hand. "—But the Corporal, ah, requests the help of you three Irregulars. She's, like, all gungho to find out what the spiders wanted in that damned storage compartment."

"Will do," I said, taking in a deep lungful of air before exhaling. I looked past the Marine and focused on Corporal Grievous standing before the open hatchway. She was looking back at me. I nodded and she held up her right hand before turning and walking inside the storage compartment.

Back to work, my PAW snickered.

"Board," Anika spoke up, her young-sounding voice full of authority, "to me."

Surprised, the rest of us looked from her to the front of the donk. The board closest to the bulkhead floated away from the other two boards and made its way between Bea and me to my diminutive wife. She took hold of the plank with both hands and then looked from me to Bea.

I realized that all of us standing by the rear of the TD2 were staring at her and her board. Even the big corpsman working on the shoulder wound up in the rear compartment.

"What?" Anika asked as she put the board on the deck and stepped into the bindings. Crouching down, she tightened the straps. "Be enabling voice recognition and pick default settings for now." My Polka Fireball looked up at me from under the rim of her Kilo helmet and focused on my eyes, adding, "I was thinking you are such wonderful ubergeek that you would be knowing of all this by now, my naughty husband."

"Deploy visor," I mumbled and everything before my eyes tinted as the heads-up display came down in front of the top part of my face. I started blinking though the items under the new menu header in my toolbar. I realized I was hard as that dogging bar down in my silk boxers.

"Board," Bea and I said at the same time, "to me."

Our anti-grav boards came to us, just below head height. I took hold of the board nearest to me with both hands and suddenly the plank gained weight as the anti-grav unit discharged the effect. Bea slung the street sweeper over her right shoulder as I oriented the nose of my board toward the rear of the donk.

Then I turned my back on Bea and Anika and slipped my boots into the bindings and knelt to tighten them up. In my mind's eye, I had the image of the big corpsman up in the compartment I was facing before kneeling; he was inspecting the inside of the shoulder wound with what looked like a tiny camera on a flexible wand; his data visor was down.

Once we were happy with the fit of our bindings, Bea and I both stood back up, we were on either side of our Polka Fireball's rear. She looked back at us nodded her head.

"Let us go," Anika said, and we lifted off the deck in unison. In echelon formation again, the three of us started toward the opened hatchway of the mysterious storage compartment 30 meters back down the corridor with the Marines in the passageway who weren't working on wounded all watching.

Ahead of us there was a brilliant flash! A body blasted out of the hatchway, yellow-orange flames and chunks of debris shooting out around her. My visor went dark.

"Oh, my, God!" Juliet said from across the table, putting down her fork, her eyes wide and her mouth opened.

Our whole household was in the crew lounge just down the passageway from our suite. By unspoken agreement none of us had asked questions or talked about anything specific concerning our day while we made our spaghetti with textured tofu balls, a big, fresh salad, and homemade biscuits. I wished that unspoken, no-discussion policy could be said about my previous night's activities.

I had to admit, the flavor of the tofu balls was actually really good. I found out that Anika had used a defrosted, meat-flavored sauce from the Royal Yacht and put the tofu in to marinate sometime before she'd gone to visit Melvina Bimini yesterday.

I'd spent much of the time we were preparing our meal answering questions about what had happened in our quarters after Anika, Juliet, and Bea left the evening before. I discovered that my repeated answer, just watch the videos, wasn't going to stop them from demanding that I answer their very long list of specific and exhaustive questions about what happened between me and our new neighbor.

However, I discovered that I was supposed to listen to them when they used the exact words to answer my questions every time I tried to change the subject to what had happened at their bachelorette party.

The saliva exploded into my mouth as I took a bite of warm biscuit that Bea made. These were wonderful, although I thought it would have been better if we'd had some Italian bread to go with the spaghetti. Biscuits like Bea's always made me imagine old-fashioned sausage gravy, although my boyhood Irie-friends would have been upset at the idea of pork sausage. However, her biscuits seemed superior when it came to sopping up sauce, compared to Italian bread. I was hungry, and that made any meal better, once we started to eat, that is.

We did wait until after the Captain addressed the entire Ship before we started eating. Anika, Bea, and I wore our holstered beam weapons armed with fresh power packs at the table; I know we each had extras on us as well. Our Kilo helmets were on the counter. Even Juliet wore her newly acquired .40 pistol holstered on the belt of her duty-blues, and like us, she had her RTC behind her right auricle and her ear-bud in place. She said nothing about the street sweeper that was leaning against the counter behind Anika's seat at the table, immediately to Juliet's right.

Beatrice had already disassembled the shotgun, cleaned and oiled the barrel and all the working parts, reassembled the weapon, replaced the two spent shells, and put the magazines back in place. So there was a slight hint of weapons-grade lubricating oil in the air. That didn't seem to bother anyone's appetite.

"You should have seen it," Bea spoke up from my right, taking a drink of red wine from the elegant goblet and swallowing. "They had to use almost a whole fire extinguisher to put Corporal Grievous out. And the smell!

"The corpsman said she was killed instantly, so she didn't suffer. The last time I saw anything that nasty," our farm-world girl told us as she swirled the wine in her goblet with a little wrist motion, "was when the neighbors' lechon barn burned down. All those little piggies certainly were roasted by the time that fire was put out—but, you know, totally over-cooked."

My paranoid ass-wipe actually grimaced down in my lizard brain, remembering what we'd seen. However, nobody else at the table seemed offended or put-off their meal at Bea's words. I put a spooled fork of spaghetti in my mouth and started to chew, enjoying the flavor of the spicy, tomato-based sauce.

The time Anika and I had spent with Grievous getting ready for the chew-show, she'd been helpful, if on task. I wondered how well Merch knew the NCO. I was certain she was one of his agents on the Glenndeavor; I'd picked her POC off the deck. Well, what was left of the device; it was a Heavy, so she was a troubleshooter. I dropped it into an evidence bag before the butter-bar Lieutenant from the investigation crew saw what I'd done. Gowno, I thought, remembering him, what a total asshole in vacuum.

As I chewed, I recognized that I hadn't started to assimilate seeing the Marine PFC dead on the back of the donk, and then what happened to Angel Grievous. I was sorry they'd been killed, but wrong place at the wrong time. If the timer had been set for a few minutes later, Anika, Beatrice, and I would have been in that storage compartment when the IED went off. That was just the way it was.

Why did it happen? my inner geek asked. Because it happens, roll the bones!

"The Captain said there were two other Marines killed," said Juliet, shaking her head, her posture perfect in her seat. "We didn't know any of them, did we?" She took another long swig of the fine red wine, emptying her second glass full. "Golly, four more killed."

"We are being fortunate that we do not," Anika said. She put the big roll of spaghetti dripping with excellent sauce she'd rotated around her fork into her mouth.

As we ate in silence for a while, I thought back on the Captain's address. She hadn't named any of the wounded or killed when she notified the crew about the three spider attacks—everyone aboard already knew that something had caused the ship-wide lockdown. Then the Captain went on to explain why the Enlisted Lounge and Officers Club were closed until further notice, and that there would be no meetings or gatherings of off-duty crewmembers, except at the Enlisted and Officers Mess, until further notice. In that way, she explained, if any other spiders attacked, there wouldn't be any soft targets not protected by armed security teams.