The ship pitches and rolls in the low gravity. We’re blind and deaf in the cargo hold, unaware of the threat that made the pilot put the craft into an evasive pattern, and the lack of control and awareness is almost worse than being stuck in a bad firefight. I scan the shipboard data nodes, and tap into the Wasp’s external video feed. For a few moments, I see nothing but distant stars careening across the dorsal camera’s field of view, but then the pilot straightens out our trajectory, and the feed of the wide-angle lens shows a piece of the battle in progress nearby.
Off our starboard bow, one of the Hammerhead cruisers is in a spin, bleeding air and frozen fluids out of hundreds of holes in its outer hull. Just beyond the cruiser, the massive bulk of the Lanky seed ship pushes its way through the hastily erected blocking position. The Lanky ship is enormous, a glistening oblong shape that looks like a cross between a seedpod and a rifle bullet. It dwarfs our cruisers, which look like sparrows trying to attack an eagle. I know that a Hammerhead is almost four hundred meters long, and the seed ship looks to be at least five times that size. I’ve seen drone shots of the seed ships in many intel briefings, but this is the first time I am looking at one through a direct camera feed, and the sight of it makes me want to crawl into my armored boots. All three of our cruisers are tattered, with hull damage I can spot even through the fish-eye lens of the dorsal camera from hundreds of klicks away, but the Lanky ship has no visible scars on its seamless black flanks. The Hammerheads are our newest capital ships, supermodern fleet defense cruisers that can hold their own against an entire SRA task force, but the Lanky seed ship just brushed two of them aside without even putting on the brakes.
The pilot changes our trajectory to catch up with our fleeing carrier, and the new camera angle points away from the Lankies and into the space between Sirius Ad and our clandestine Alcubierre transition point. I’m not an astrogator, but I can read movement vectors and do some relative speed calculations in my head, and it’s pretty clear that the crew chief is right—there’s no way we’ll catch up with the Manitoba and her escorts, and our pilot is pushing the Wasp as fast as it will go already. Our carrier is running away at full acceleration, trying to make Alcubierre before the Lanky seed ship catches up and hammers our hundred-thousand-ton flagship into scrap.
“What a fucked-up day,” the platoon sergeant says to no one in particular.
Without the hint of a warning, the rear cargo door of the drop ship disintegrates. The concussion of an impact slaps through the ship like the shock wave of a grenade. Something fast and superheated tears through the troop compartment from back to front and then bores through the bulkhead on my right. There’s violent decompression in the cargo hold as all the air gets vented through the wound in the drop ship’s outer hull. My suit automatically seals itself and turns on its own oxygen feed as I get whipped around in the straps of my seat. The back of my head makes contact with the hull behind me, and even with the padding of my helmet, the impact is enough to make me see red stars in front of my eyes. The sudden chaos in the cargo hold is complete—everything that wasn’t strapped down is getting blown around. With the air gone, there’s no sound coming from my external audio feed, and the silence lends a surreal quality to the event. When my vision returns and my world slows its spin, I reach for the rifle next to my seat out of pure habit, only to find that my M-66 has disappeared, torn from its storage bracket.
The cargo hold is a scene of utter carnage. Whatever blew through the rear hatch tore through the ship from tail to nose at a slight angle from right to left of our centerline. Bits and pieces of bulkhead armor, seats, webbing, and people are rushing past my eyes on their way out of the rear of the ship. I look to my left to see that we are trailing a comet tail of debris and frozen oxygen. The row of seats across the aisle from me is no longer there, and neither are the people who were strapped into them just a few moments ago. Half the cockpit bulkhead to my right is torn away, and instead of seeing into the drop ship’s galley and head that should be beyond the shattered bulkhead, I look into empty space. The armored door to the cockpit is gone, and the area in front of it looks like we ran nose-first into the Manitoba’s armor belt at top speed. From the movement of the stars beyond the massive holes in our hull, I can tell we’re in a spin.