The Kraits
In Tilleke Space
Krait, n, (krit) extremely venomous snake, originally from the Indian subcontinent of Earth; preferred method of attack is to spring from hiding. Bite is fatal.
The First Sister Pilot looked down the long line of creche-born warriors, forty in all. Her heart filled with pride. In just a moment they would activate the transporters to send the forty warriors and five Sister Pilots into the enemy’s battleship. Nine other kraits would do the same, flooding the London with four hundred of the Emperor’s storm troopers and fifty trained pilots and engineers.
“All glory to the Emperor!” she cried. “Remember your duty! You are Savak! Faith in the Emperor! Victory or martyrdom! Fear not death; you live through your brothers!”
The forty men, anonymous in black uniforms, chest armor and helmets, raised gloved fists. “Victory or martyrdom!” they shouted in unison.
First Sister Pilot activated the transporter. The air crackled and misted, then cold air gusted outward and snow swirled in a blustery cloud…then the forty men disappeared. She nodded in satisfaction and relief; the transporters were notoriously temperamental, but this time had worked flawlessly. She turned to her four sisters, seeing in each a younger reflection of her own face. “Come,” she said softly, and they crowded beside her in a tight circle, heads together, arms intertwined. “Prepare yourselves, for now we must do our duty to the Emperor, however perilous. All who die in duty to the Emperor shall be reborn in the creche.”
They took five of the seats just used by the soldiers. No one would stay behind to operate the krait. All were committed to victory. First Sister Pilot looked at the others. Second and Third looked grimly determined; Fourth was pale and Fifth had her eyes screwed tightly shut. First Sister Pilot took a deep breath. “For the Emperor!” She pushed the control stud.
“Hey, Chief, take a look at this.” In the engine room of the H.M.S. London, Chief Engineer Joan Mastromonico looked up in bewilderment as snow suddenly gusted across the main deck. What the hell? Snow? Then, through the blowing squall, she dimly saw dark shapes, hazy at first, then abruptly more substantial. The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. No, that can’t be! Teleportation is impossible! As she watched the shapes coalesce into men, she thought: How did they ever do that?
Then one of the shapes stepped forward and shot her in the head.
The London carried a contingent of two thousand four hundred crew, plus fifty Marines. There wasn’t much use for Marines in a space battle, except in the very rare cases where Marines were used to board an enemy vessel. Admiral Skiffington had used that tactic to seize a Dominion space station during the Battle of Windsor. In the few instances when land troops were needed, they were usually brought in separate troop transports, capable of holding up to ten thousand soldiers each, plus their fighting gear. As always in battle situations, there were two Marine guards stationed on the bridge. They were armed only with Bull Pups, and their presence was more to help out in the event one of the bridge crew became hysterical during a rough battle. It had happened.
On the bridge, the Communications Chief’s console suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree. He listened to one frantic call, then another, then a third. Without consulting either the Commander or the Admiral, he pushed the stud that would allow him to broadcast throughout the entire ship. Then he spoke words never heard before on a Victorian Fleet warship: “Marines, stand to and repel boarders! This is not a drill! Repel all boarders!”
Admiral Skiffington, in the midst of a hurried conference call with his remaining battle group leaders, looked up in astonishment. “What did he say?” he asked.
The Savak swarmed through the corridors like ravenous wolves. Curious crewmen heard the commotion, stuck their heads out to see what was happening and were shot. A group of ten men and woman turned a corner and fell before a fusillade of pellets. The London was the size of a small village, with thousands of compartments, main corridors, branch corridors and utility shafts, but there were now four hundred armed men aboard with only one goal: kill all of the crew. Each of the creche-born warriors carried his rifle, four hundred rounds of ammunition and a spare pressure charge. Each man knew one certainty: There was no way off this enemy ship but through victory.
Aret1 led the platoon that had been transported directly into the enemy’s engineering deck. They had secured it within a minute by the simple expedient of killing everyone there. Aret1 had left three men to hold it and had immediately begun moving toward the platoon’s second objective, the bridge. Other platoons were charged with cleaning out each compartment along the way. Aret1’s job was to neutralize the enemy bridge. Just as he left the engineering deck, he heard the crackle of the transporter as the five Sister Pilots arrived.
“Move, move!” he urged on his troops. He had fifteen Arets, fifteen Brets and ten of the larger, lumbering Crets. He hadn’t wanted the Crets, too slow. Speed was the key. Speed and violence. One of the Crets stopped to shoot someone who had emerged from a compartment behind them. “Keep up!” snarled Aret1. Ahead a sailor was frantically trying to shut a bulkhead hatch. Aret1 smashed him aside, shoved open the hatch and plunged through. His platoon raced behind him, Bret4 pausing only long enough to shoot the moaning sailor in the head.
Later, Corporal Cookie Sanchez would decide that she was saved only because she was in the armory, replacing a faulty power pack connector for her Bull Pup. It had taken her an hour to find the problem — a cracked solder — and she had just finished recharging her weapon when the ship’s intercom came on.
“Marines, stand to and repel boarders! This is not a drill! Repel all boarders!”
A Marine private working beside her at the repair bench looked up, mouth dropping open. “What the fuck?”
Cookie had decided it had to be a joke, or a mistake, or something, when the intercom blared again: “All Marines, intruders have seized the main engineering deck! They are armed and dangerous. Many casualties reported.”
Four Marines pounded into the armory. The sergeant in charge of the armory barked orders. “Get a Bull Pup and ammo! Get armor and check to make sure your radio works.”
“Powered armor?” one of the asked.
“No time, takes too long to power up.” He looked around, his eyes falling on Cookie. “Corporal, you take this group, head right for Engineering! Shoot anybody who ain’t one of ours!”
Cookie frantically pulled on her chest armor and a ballistic helmet, grabbed two grenades and stuffed them into her waist pouch, hesitated, then grabbed two more. For good measure she strapped on a blaster pistol. She wished she could use the command helmet, with its head’s up display and communications network, but none of the helmets were charged and now there was no time.
The gunnery sergeant was Capezzera, one of her favorites. He had four tattoos of tears on his face, all of them blood red, two under each eye. Cookie had asked him once why he had the tears. He had smiled wanly and shook his head. “These are blood tears, solider. You only get one when things go really, really wrong, but you survive anyway. Just hope you never earn your own.”
Now he took her by the arm and pulled her aside. “Put one man in front of you, but stay close. These kids are gonna be really juiced up; I don’t want ‘em shooting our own people by mistake. You understand?”
Cookie nodded, trying to shake the dreamy feeling that none of this was really happening. Capezzera seemed to understand, for he gripped her arm painfully tight to keep her focused.
“I’ll send more people after you as soon as they’re ready. Take these-”he clipped four more ammo clips onto her webbing — “you always use more ammo than you expect.” He glanced at her blaster pistol. “Don’t set that on narrow beam or you’ll blow a hole through the hull, right?” He looked at her hard, nodded and stepped back. “Move your ass, Corporal, don’t keep the war waiting!”
Five minutes later Sergeant Capezzera was busy handing out weapons, grenades and armor when six men stepped into the room. He just had time to notice that the color of their uniform was wrong before they opened fire.
On the bridge of the London, Admiral Skiffington was in a rage. Power had been lost to half his missile platforms and two of the heavy lasers. Calls to the Engineering Deck were unanswered.
“Lieutenant!” he barked at Grant. “Take the two Marines and go to Engineering. I want a status report.”
“Yes, sir!” He jumped from his chair and headed to the door, gesturing to the two Marine sentries.
“But, sir,” one of them protested in a whisper. “If we go with you, the bridge will be unguarded.”
Grant jerked a thumb at his father. “Tell him that.”
The Marine muttered something indecorous under his breath and brought his rifle to port arms. “Lead the way, Lieutenant.”
The lifts weren’t working. They climbed down ten levels using the maintenance ladders, then began trotting aft to Engineering, which was located in the first section forward of the ship’s anti-matter engines. The passageway did not go in a straight line, but turned left or right every hundred feet or so, then turned aft again. Twice they had to manually open crash doors.
Halfway to Engineering, they found the first bodies; five sailors sprawled on the deck in spreading pools of blood. The two Marines stopped dead. “Bugger me!” one of them snarled, terrified and pissed off all at the same time. Grant tried to report what they had found, but got no response on the com. He urgently, desperately wished he had a gun. They moved forward more slowly after that, the Marines with their weapons at their shoulders, ready to fire.
The first Marine died a few minutes later. In the distance they heard screams and shooting. The Marine private in front, Lussier or Loubier, Grant couldn’t remember which, turned to him and whispered: “We’re getting close, Lieutenant.” Then he rounded the corner and suddenly jerked back, arms out flung, weapon flying and crashed to the floor. Grant was dimly aware of popping sounds and the sharp ping! of something ricocheting off the bulkhead. The soldier behind him screamed “Jerome!” and rushed forward to his fallen comrade, only to collapse in a hail of shots.
Grant Skiffington, son and personal aide to the most famous admiral in Victorian history, turned and ran.
Cookie slammed another magazine into her Bull Pup. “Sweet Gods of Our Mothers, what a cluster fuck,” she muttered. The two remaining Marines of her mini-squad crouched beside her. The other two had died in a short, nasty fight when they bumped into a group of five Savak. She knew they were Savak, because she had stripped the ballistic helmets off of one of them and saw the surgical scars on his forehead. All the Savak were rumored to have them, remnants of surgery done to every Savak baby for some perverse reason known only to the Tilleke Emperor.
As odd as seeing Savak storm troopers on board a Victorian war ship, though, was the fact that the five men they had killed looked enough alike to be brothers, right down to the cleft in their chins. Weird, and not a little disturbing. Quintuplets? She wasn’t sure she cared, as long as they were dead. Mentally, she dubbed them “Bob.”
“Corporal,” hissed Cogan. “More coming!”
Cookie didn’t hesitate. She pulled the pin on one of her grenades, listened as the footsteps grew closer, then flipped the grenade around the corner and ducked back. There was a satisfying ‘crump!’ followed by even more satisfying screams. She rounded the corner, shooting the first two Savak she saw. Three others were on the ground. One was on his knees, his helmet faceplate blown off, and blood streaming from his face. No weapon.
Cogan raised his Bull Pup, but Cookie held up a hand to restrain him. “Hold it, Cogan,” she said. “Maybe he can tell us how many others are on board.” The Savak soldier staggered to his feet, raising his hands above his head.
“Cuff him and frisk him,” she ordered Cogan, who stepped forward, reaching with one hand to grab the prisoner’s wrist. The Savak took a half step back, slid his hands to the back of his neck and hunched his shoulders.
“Cogan!” Cookie screamed. Cogan was already jerking back, but too slow, too slow. The Savak brought his arms up and around in a flat slashing motion — Oh, Mothers, was that a sword? — and Cogan’s head seemed to leap from his body, blood spraying in rhythmic spurts. Then the Savak was bellowing and lunching forward — it was a sword, she could see it clearly now — and Cookie was screaming and shooting and the Savak jerked and lunged and she shot again and he jerked a second time and collapsed with a meaty ‘thump!’ at her feet. His sword clattered to the deck.
Cookie skittered back until she was up against the bulkhead. Her chest was heaving and her teeth were chattering, which she dimly thought was odd. Then the other private, Mickey Millard, was shaking her and shouting, “Corporal? Corporal! Are you okay?”
And with that, abruptly, she was. Her teeth stopped chattering and the corridor leapt into focus. Millard was looking at her anxiously. She tried to smile. “I’m okay, Mickey.” She took a deep breath and stepped forward. Little shaky, but not too bad. “Get Cogan’s ammo and grenades, we’re gonna need them.”
“Bugger me! He killed him with a sword! A fucking sword!” Now that his Corporal seemed okay, Millard began to come apart at the seams.
Cookie stopped down next to Cogan’s body, stripped the extra ammo clips off his harness and patted his pockets for grenades. The lights suddenly flickered off, leaving the corridor dimly lit by bluish emergency lamps. In the distance, she saw someone run past a corridor entrance, then the sound of shooting. She stood up. God, she was thirsty. “Come on, Mickey, we’ve got to get to Engineering.”
Aret1 stood at the hatchway leading to the London’s bridge. Two Brets stood on either side of him. They had fought their way past several small groups of Victorian Marines to get here, taking casualties along the way. Now all he had were eight of his Arets, nine Brets and two of the slow Crets. The fact that the hatchway wasn’t guarded made him uneasy. Was it a trap? Would a platoon of Victorian Marines be waiting on the other side? He turned to face the others.
“When we go in, split up left and right,” he signaled, using he hand signs they had all learned as children. “Kill them all!” He drew a breath. “Glory to the Emperor!” he shouted, then pushed open the hatchway.
“Westchester, respond! I am ordering you to move four hundred miles forward and take up a screening position. Acknowledge!” Admiral Skiffington watched the hologram for a moment. Westchester did not move. “Dammit, what are they doing?” he roared.
“No reply, Admiral,” the Communications Officer said. “Nothing from Westchester, Sea Witch or Balmorel. The Yorkshire is responding and moving into position now.”
Admiral Skiffington watched the battle unfold on his hologram. The two Battle Groups on his right flank, Alpha and Bravo, were gone. Annihilated. One after another, the ship colors had turned from blue to blinking orange. His left flank, the Battle Groups he had commandeered from Third Fleet, were badly chewed up and scattered. His remaining two Battle Groups seemed still intact, but more and more they weren’t responding to his commands. One by one they were falling out of formation and just hanging in space. The computer still displayed them as combat ready…but they weren’t.
He didn’t understand.
The hatchway swung open and armed men spilled into the room. Everyone on the bridge stopped what they were doing and stared. Someone stifled a scream. Admiral Skiffington stared. A spark of anger flared within him and grew. These men. He stood and pointed at them. “Get off my bridge!” he thundered.
Grant Skiffington hugged the wall. Ten feet ahead of him four Marines lay sprawled in an intersection of two corridors, killed in some earlier skirmish. Grant could hear calls and screams and more shooting. He knelt down and peeked rapidly around the corner. Three of the armed intruders stood, backs to him, less than one hundred feet away. He looked back at the dead Marines. One of them still clutched a Bull Pup in his hand. He wanted that gun. Another peek; the gunmen were still facing the other way. He took a step-
A strong arm snaked around his neck and jerked him off his feet. “Gods of Our Mothers, didn’t you learn anything at Gettysburg?” a voice whispered harshly.
Grant squirmed around to see a Marine in a ballistic helmet. The figure raised the visor. “Cookie?” he stammered. She put a finger to her lips. “Shhssh. How many?”
“Three, about a hundred feet up.”
Cookie gestured to Millard, who crept to the corner, then flung a grenade. As soon as it exploded, Cookie and Millard stepped into the corridor and fired down its length. “Okay,” she called to Grant. “Get a gun and as much ammo as you can find.”
“That was my last grenade, Corporal,” Millard said.
“I know, Mickey.” She turned to Grant. “Do you have any idea what the hell is going on?”
“I know the Ducks are involved. I think those Dominion ships we rescued nailed the Sussex. They’ve got to be working with the Tilleke somehow.” Grant checked the charge on the Bull Pup. Half full. He found another clip and pocketed it. One Marine had a pistol on his belt and Grant took that as well, stuffing it into his pants.
Cookie grimaced. “The Ducks are working with the Tilleke? Then we are truly fucked.” She gestured to the dead intruders. “These guys are Savak, the Emperor’s Guard unit. Somehow they got on board, a lot of them. I’ve counted over sixty that we’ve seen and from the sounds, there must be more. They’re going room to room, killing everybody they find.”
Aret1 nodded when First Sister Pilot led the other Pilots onto the bridge. “The ship is yours,” he told her. We hold Engineering, Combat Systems and the bridge. We will eliminate the rest of the crew within the next hour.”
“The Emperor’s blessings!” she replied, eyes sparkling. They had captured a Victorian battleship intact! Her Sister Pilots quickly fanned out to the control systems they had studied for years. One opened a com to the Engineering Room, where other Pilots were bringing up power and restoring systems. First Sister Pilot found the ship’s navigation lights and turned them on, then examined the sensor display. There were six other Victorian ships in the immediate vicinity, three of them with blinking navigation lights. She studied the ships without navigations lights. Each of those ships would soon be the target of a Savak attack. She looked at her watch. Her orders were to destroy any ship not captured within two hours. “Get the missile systems ready,” she ordered.
The lights suddenly flared on, making Grant blink and Cookie and Millard duck into the nearest doorway. “Get out of the corridor!’” Cookie hissed. They waited a moment. In the distance there was the sound of intermittent shooting. Millard reached up to a wall com.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Grant told him. Millard looked at Cookie in confusion. “But the power’s on. We can get help!”
Grant shook his head. “It means we’ve lost the ship. If you call in, they’ll know there are survivors and exactly where we are.”
There was a shout, then a shot. Millard screamed and clutched his leg, blood blossoming between his fingers. Cookie crouched, let loose a burst, then a second, then they were running, dragging Millard by his combat harness.
Behind them they heard shouts and the pounding of pursuing feet. They reached an intersection, saw more Savak coming from the right, and then more yet emerged at the far end of the corridor. “Left!” Cookie shouted, then cursed as a pellet ricocheted off her helmet. Grant stopped in front of her and she bounced off him. “What?” she cried. They were in a dead end. Millard pushed himself up against the wall and shakily raised his weapon. Cookie unclipped her last grenade and tossed it around the corner, then knelt and raised her weapon, only dimly aware that Grant was struggling to open some hatchway in the wall. The grenade rattled along the deck, but obstinately refused to explode. Footsteps pounded closer. One Savak skidded into the intersection and Cookie hammered him with a short burst. A second ducked his arm around and fired a spray of pellets. Millard uttered a sharp cry of pain. “Goddammit, I’m hit again!”
“We’re having fun now!” Cookie muttered. Then Grant grabbed her by her battle harness and pulled her backwards though a small enclosure. She tripped and sprawled on the deck
“Don’t leave me,” Millard begged. “Don’t leave me!” He began to crawl across the deck. A spray of pellets stuck the wall above him. He reached out an imploring hand. “Please! Corporal, help me!”
Cookie struggled to her knees, but a Savak commando suddenly loomed in the hatchway. Cookie tried frantically to bring her rifle to bear, but the front sight caught on her clothing. The Savak was shouting something, his weapon almost on her, and then he flinched backwards, blood spurting from his knee. Grant shot him a second time in the leg. The storm trooper’s leg buckled and he fell on top of Cookie, pinning her with his weight, and then Millard was screaming in agony and another Savak was there, firing again and again into Millard’s chest and Grant stepped forward and smashed his fist against the large red button on the wall.
The hatchway closed with a bang and suddenly they were all hurled to the floor by a tremendous jerk.
And then Cookie understood: They were in one of the ship’s escape pods. The explosive bolts blew and kicked the pod into space, leaving the London behind.