"This is your last warning!" the voice bellowed again. "Move back from the door!"
"I've got it!" said Yishna, in triumph.
As the door began opening, it seemed the marksmen could hold off no longer. The racket was horrible, vicious. Sparks and coils of metal zinged through the air all around us. I saw Yishna spin to one side, clutching her shoulder. Orduval jerked forward as if someone had just placed ice against his back. I felt a violent tugging at my clothing. Glancing down I saw a great splash of blood across my middle, spatters of blood elsewhere, some of them spreading.
"Oh," said Orduval, sounding both surprised and somehow disappointed. He made a glutinous coughing sound. Then, turning slowly, he released his hold and drifted, head bowing and breath exhaling in a long sigh. There was a hole in his back nearly the size of someone's head, and blood pumping from severed arteries was beading in the air.
"Orduval!" Yishna's cry was anguished.
I guess the cage cut down on the number of projectiles that got through, but not enough. In one brief moment Uskaron had become just a legend that would live on here. I felt sickened and unutterably sad. Yishna's grief echoed all around me, as the suited figures descended around us. The door was fully open now, but I knew that other security precautions lay within, and that without her expertise I would be going no further. I didn't even know how much of the blood spattered on me was my own, but in any case I shut down my heart and lungs and allowed myself to go limp. I lapsed immediately into the apparent death that only Rhodane knew to be illusory, I don't know why.
Harald
Ironfist shuddered under multiple impacts delivered by the weapons on Platform Three, but its shields were still holding well and those impacts grew less intense as, with a roar reaching a crescendo, the great vessel entered upper atmosphere. On one of his screens Harald observed some detonations in the mid-section of Desert Wind, which then slewed aside from a growing debris cloud. He waited for a few minutes, to watch the same ship straighten up. Then, checking a tactical feed, he swung his view to one side to see a Combine assault vessel bucking under the multiple impacts of coil-gun missiles, before spinning down out of sight, burning as it went.
"Franorl, status?" he barked.
The other Captain did not answer immediately so Harald pulled up a view of Desert Wind's Bridge.
Franorl looked harried as he stood, arms akimbo, over one of his crew.
"The fire suppressant isn't working," said the subordinate. "And I can't shut down the line."
"Then close the section down and vent it."
"But, Captain, we're in atmosphere."
"Very thin atmosphere," Franorl observed.
Switching to another camera, Harald felt his gut tighten as he observed, from inside the ship, a hole ripped through the hull, glowing wreckage and two charred corpses stuck to the deck. Almost in sympathy with this horrible image, his head began to throb violently, and he automatically reached into his pocket for his painkilling capsules, taking two of them at a time now.
Pulling his view back behind closed bulkhead doors, Harald saw crew clad in survival suits battling an oxygen fire, which was fed by a broken line and maintained by the partially molten remains of a white-hot shield generator. Metal was burning. He heard the order given to evacuate that entire section and watched them run for safety, some not making it in time through the rapidly closing bulkhead doors. Another set of doors near the impact site then opened, and the air pressure inside exploded into the meagre atmosphere outside, sucking with it both fire and remaining people. Some crew members managed to hold on, others became fuel to the flames and burned a greasy yellow as they screamed out into the gulf. The inferno diminished but, still fed by the line, did not go out until a brave engineer in a heat-resistant suit finally tracked down the line's source and closed it manually.
"Franorl, status?" Harald demanded tightly when this was all over.
Captain Franorl appeared on Harald's eye-screen. "We took a hit, sir, but we have it under control now. Minimal casualties."
About thirty, by Harald's count.
The roar reached a climax, as if Ironfist had now entered the peak winds of some hurricane—which in essence it had. The firing upon them had become intermittent, but it seemed Combine personnel were now using steering thrusters, trying to tilt Platform Three so as to bring its big guns back on target.
"Increase to one-quarter drive," Harald ordered. "We need to get—"
Tactical alert.
Harald tracked down the source and called up the relevant views. Resilience, poised out from Corisanthe III, had taken a major pounding. There were three definite hits upon the hilldigger which had rather neatly taken it out of action. He felt a surge of uncharacteristic panic upon seeing this so soon after the enemy's successful strike against Franorl's Desert Wind. Were Combine forces employing some new type of weapon? His panic slowly receded as he carefully analysed the three strikes made upon the ship, and realised how conveniently placed they were. A now familiar anger flooded in to replace the panic and he found himself up on his feet, pacing back and forth before his array of screens.
"Orvram Davidson," he said, addressing the mutinous Captain of Resilience. "Perhaps you did not learn anything from Tlaster Cobe?" He would now put Davidson's hilldigger on a course to ram Corisanthe III. Those aboard the station would then have to destroy the approaching ship or themselves be destroyed. However, even as he opened up the channels to seize control, there were further explosions aboard Resilience: fuel lines, generators, a whole network of systems. The sabotage put the steering controls of that hilldigger beyond Harald's reach.
Orvram Davidson now appeared on one of Harald's large screens. "Oh I did learn, Admiral Harald," replied the Captain. "I think we've all now learned that our overall commander is quite insane, and was so even before some sensible soul managed to put a bullet in his head."
This reply was delivered on uncoded general address, so could be picked up by anyone, even though Harald had supposedly shut down the young Captain's ability to broadcast. The voice coming from the screen speaker also seemed excessively loud. Harald paused in his pacing and glanced about the Bridge, noting how crew were turning to look over towards him, though hurriedly returning attention to their tasks upon catching his glance. The ache in his head still growing, despite the painkillers, Harald began tracking Resilience's systems, trying to find out how Davidson had managed this communication. Abruptly, vividly, he remembered Cheanil, wounded aboard Defence Platform One, and then apologising for her stupidity in getting herself shot because she could not resist grandstanding. Harald cursed himself for his idiocy in contacting Davidson to indulge in similar grandstanding, before trying to seize control. Yet he also felt a gratitude to Davidson as other memories began to surface clearly in his mind's sea.
"You know, Harald," continued Davidson, "I almost made the mistake of respecting you, and I really wish you could have been my Admiral. I would have followed you readily into battle, confident in the soundness of your tactics and knowing we had every chance of winning. But not into battle against my own kind, Harald. Never against my own kind."
There it is. Somehow Davidson had managed to do a bit of reprogramming of his own—the ship's computers were telling Harald's programs that there was one less broadcasting array than there actually was, so they were ignoring it, ignoring the one Davidson was using. Harald began to cut and paste some of his control programs to get around this problem, meanwhile wondering how much help Davidson might have received from other supposedly loyal officers.