“Drills hot,” I order. They echo confirmation one by one. “Helmets up. Let’s burn.”
I flip the rotation toggle on my clawDrill clockwise. Beneath, the drill whirs. I plunge both hands forward in the control prism. Existence shakes. Teeth rattle. The metal deck sags under me. Molten metal peels back. I lurch ten meters down into the ship. Carving through the deck in five seconds. And the one after that. I sink again, falling through the floor of the hangar bay completely. Chewed metal around the cockpit. Then the next deck goes. Then the next. Heat builds along the drill as I slam through more of the ship, leaving the Valkyrie behind. Slow, the drill jams, slow and you die. And this speed is the pulse of my people. Momentum flowing into more momentum.
My clawDrill is building up a hell of a pace. Slamming through decks. Murdering metal with molten tungsten carbide teeth. I glimpse fractured sights of the other clawdrills ripping through the heart of the ship as we fall through the dimly lit barracks. Each drill glowing with heat and then slamming into the next deck. It is a glorious, horrible sight. Going through a mess hall. Through a water tank, then a hallway where a boarding party stumbles back from the debris and stares at the megalithic drills carving through the ship like the molten hands of some hilarious metal god.
“Don’t slow,” I roar, entire body convulsing in the seat. I’m out of control, going too fast, drill too hot. Then…nothing. I breach the belly of the Pax. Silence of space grips me. Weightless. I float like a spear through water toward the huge Colossus. LeechCraft bound for the Pax streak past me, one close enough I can see the captain’s wide eyes inside the cockpit. Another flies straight into my superheated drill’s mouth. Shredded in seconds. Men and debris cartwheel to the side. The other drills exit farther down the Pax’s belly, bursting into space, diving for the MoonBreaker. Around us, the battle rages. Blue explosions, huge fields of flak. Mustang’s group racing along the edge of Roque’s formations, exchanging punishing broadsides. Sevro still waits, hiding.
I can feel the confusion in the enemy gunners. I’m in the center of their leechCraft assault teams. They can’t fire. Their computers won’t even register the vessel classification. It’ll look like a hunk of debris shaped like an arm from the elbow down. I doubt the bridge will even know what it is without seeing it with their naked eye.
“Blast engines,” I say. The engines of the retrofitted clawDrill kick behind me and hurl me down at the black surface of the Colossus. Recognizing my threat, a ripWing sprays me with chain gun rounds. Thumb-sized bullets slam silently into the drill. The armor holds. Not so on the clawDrill beside mine. When a railgun round fired from a five-meter gun along the top-crest of the MoonBreaker punches through the cockpit, murdering the Helldiver in it, his ship shatters. One of his drillbits slams into my glass cockpit, cracking it. A dozen more rounds shred the leechCraft beside me. Roque might not know what the 30 meter projectiles coming from my ship are, but he’s willing to kill his own men to stop their approach.
Gray metal blurs toward me. A railgun slug fired from the Colossus punches through three leechCraft in front of my ship before striking the bottom of my clawDrill, at the “wrist.” It tears up the length of the drill, erupts up through the floor of my cockpit, between my legs, inches from my balls, scraping along my chest, almost taking my head off at the jaw. I jerk back and the slug slams into the metal support of the cockpit. Shattering the glass and bending the bar outward like a melting plastic straw. I gasp, knocked half unconscious by the kinetic energy transference.
White spots flash across my vision.
I shake myself. Trying to bring my senses back.
I’ve spun off course. This rig isn’t meant for steering. About to slam into the MoonBreaker’s deck. Instinct doesn’t save me. My friends do. The clawDrill’s engines are slaved to the bank of Blues back on Orion’s ship. Someone reverses the thrusters at the last moment so I don’t crash. I’m slammed back in my seat as the clawDrill slows and then lands gently onto the surface of the Colossus. I jerk in my seat, laughing in fear.
“Bloodydamn” I whoop to my distant saviors, whoever they are. “Thank you!”
But the clawDrill itself is all manual. Blues can’t operate the digits any better than I can plot slingshots around a planet. My hands dance over the controls, flowing into my old mode of labor. I reactivate the drill, using my engines to push me down like a nail into the surface of the ship. Metal wheezes. Bolts rattle. And I begin to gnaw through the top layer of armor, which they said no leechCraft could penetrate.
Pressure hisses out around my drill. I ramp up the revolutions, my hands dancing through the controls, shifting the drill bits as they overheat, cycling through cooled units. Space disappears. I burrow into the warship. Carving not in a straight line, but a tunnel toward the front of the ship. One deck. Two decks. Chewing through halls and barracks and generators and gas lines. It’s hideous and as savage a thing as I’ve ever done. I just pray I don’t hit a munitions store. Men and women and debris fly out into space through the hole I’ve carved like autumn leaves sucked from the various deck levels I penetrate. Bulkheads will seal off the wound, but those caught between the bulkheads and the tunnel are good as dead.
Three hundred meters into the ship, my clawDrill breaks down. Drill bits spent and engine overheating. I reach down to pop my cockpit canopy to abandon the drill, but my hand slips on the lever. Blood coats it. I search my body frantically. But my armor isn’t punctured. The blood isn’t from me. It floats off the right cockpit wall, slick around the round railgun slug that pierced the three leechCraft to imbed itself in the support beam of my clawDrill. Bits of hair and a fragment of bone clump in the clotting blood.
I leave my clawDrill behind for the vacuum of the tunnel I carved. Air no longer gushing from the ship. It’s calm now, the pressure already vented and the emergency bulkheads closed to quarantine the compromised hull. The gravity generator in this section of the ship must have been hit. My hair floats in my helmet.
I look up. At the end of the tunnel, where I penetrated the hull, is a little keyhole to the stars. A dead man drifts just beyond it, slowly spiraling. A shadow grips him as Antonia’s flagship passes beyond, blocking the light reflected from Jupiter’s surface. Like the man, I’m left in darkness. Alone in the belly of the Colossus. My com a flood of war-chatter. Victra is launching from our hangar. Orion and the Moon Lords are in flight, knocked off the poles of Io and bound for Jupiter. Mustang’s flagship is now under assault by Roque’s ship as Antonia leads the rest of his fleet after the retreating Telemanuses and Raas.
Still, Sevro waits.