The shields were crucial. Without a layer of deflector shields to slow down incoming projectiles, the ship’s armor wouldn’t be able to stop the heavier mass driver rounds. They’d punch right through, and start wrecking internal systems. Things would go downhill fast once that started happening.
I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about the yakuza getting their butts kicked if I wasn’t still on this ship. It would really suck to get blown up by friendly fire. Maybe my bomb would do enough damage to knock them out of the fight?
My radiator temperature finally dropped below a thousand Kelvins. Time to get moving again. I wanted at least two armored bulkheads between me and this bomb before I set it off. I left a fire team behind to guard the bomb, and took off towards the bridge with my last fire team.
I didn’t get very far before the whole ship lurched wildly, and the artificial gravity went out. The compartments groaned and twisted around me, and a series of bangs and crashes echoed through the corridors. I shook my head, momentarily disoriented.
“What was that?” Emla asked.
“Hyperspace transition,” I told her. “Gaia’s breath, what are these nutjobs doing? Forcing a transition out of the Delta Layer in a ship that’s taken this much damage? The stress could have torn the ship apart.”
Scanning the status reports, I saw that it just about had. The aft section of the ship, where my demo charges had done most of their damage, was warped and twisted like some kind of crazy abstract sculpture. What were they up to? The ship wasn’t going anywhere in this condition, and the mercenary squadron would just follow us down. It might take them a few minutes, because they weren’t going to do any crazy unplanned crash transitions, but so what?
The gravity didn’t come back on. Instead there was a rumbling vibration in the machinery all around the maintenance tunnel I was floating through. Back where my last fight had taken place gouts of steam erupted from damaged piping, and then the exterior view showed a massive clout of superheated vapor enveloping the ship.
They were crash cooling the hyperspace converter? I guess they could afford to, since they weren’t going to be using any of that water as reaction mass for the ship’s drive. So maybe they could get down to the Beta Layer before anyone caught up with them, and buy another fifteen or twenty minutes of breathing room. That still wasn’t enough to do anything, was it?
A com from Akio interrupted my confusion. “Alice! Uncle Noburu is on the move.”
“He is? I thought he’d be hiding on the bridge.”
The ship’s bridge and the command facilities around it were protected by even more armor than the detention center, and my destructor bot was out of solvent. I hadn’t even considered trying to go after him for real, because I assumed trying to break in would be a lost cause.
“He was,” Akio confirmed. “But he just sent another detachment of marines to reinforce the guard on the hanger where the captain’s pinnace is stored, and his bodyguards are getting ready to exit the bridge. They’ll be opening the blast doors soon, but he’s got every marine left on this ship headed in that direction.”
“Well, crash. That would be a nice opportunity, but I’d never get through that many bots fast enough to keep him from running away. Wait, does the pinnace have a hyperspace converter?”
“I don’t know. He had the usual pinnace replaced with another model while the expedition was being organized, and no one seems to have any information on it. My techs think it looks pretty stealthy, though.”
“Do you have pictures?”
“Sure.”
I glanced over the images he sent me. Yeah, that was some kind of high-performance stealth ship. It was way too small to be able to get into the Delta Layer, but a good engineer might be able to pack enough power into that hull to reach the Gamma Layer. It would take months to limp home that way, but they’d get there eventually.
There wouldn’t be enough room for all of his people, but a guy like Yamashida wouldn’t care. He’d leave them behind to fight on for as long as they could, and then set off the self-destruct bomb to hide the fact that he’d gotten away. All he needed was a chance to launch his escape ship when no one was looking.
“This jerk is not going to sneak away,” I growled. I looked over the ship’s deck plans, thinking furiously. There were too many ways to get from the bridge to that hangar. If I tried to intercept him he’d just divert to a different route, and if I went for the hanger he’d be on his escape ship before I could fight my way through all the guards. But I was getting used to coming up with crazy plans, now. This one was easy.
“Akio, can your people open up lift tube 37-C all the way down to deck one, and shut down the lift field?” I asked.
“Ummmm, yes, they say they can make that happen. But there are security cameras all along that route, and we can’t shut them down. They’ll see you coming.”
“We’ll see about that.”
It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. At my direction Emla ripped a long gash in the side of a coolant pipe, and a spray of pressurized water arced out to wash over us. It instantly vaporized when it struck my overworked radiators, and the tunnel quickly filled with live steam. But it carried off amazing amounts of heat in the process, and my radiator temperature plummeted. It wasn’t long at all before my bots and I were all back down to room temperature.
“He’s exited the bridge now,” Akio informed me. “It’s a short trip to the hangar, so whatever you’re going to do you’d better make it fast.”
“I’ve got this, Akio.”
Most of my bots had taken enough damage to ruin their stealth, but there was one gunbot that could still cloak properly. Emla’s dragon form couldn’t, since some of her active camouflage modules had been melted off by a plasma flamer during that last melee. But when she split back into a pair of dragon girls there were enough camo modules left to cover one of them. So I took that one with me, and sent the rest of the group to fake an attack on the bridge. This was more likely to work if they thought they knew where I was.
My own active camouflage was still in perfect shape, and while my rocket hammer was a little battered by now I’d come prepared for that. I slapped fresh cover plates over the rocket nozzle and the business end of the hammer, and led my sadly reduced party towards the lift shaft.
There were no alarms as we dove invisibly down the empty shaft. No marines or warbots, either. Nothing but an empty shaft all the way down to the ship’s bottom deck, just inside the hull.
The airlocks would all have alarms, of course, and I certainly wasn’t going to be punching a hole in the ship’s hull. The armor there was a meter thick, and pretty much impervious to anything I could hit it with. But one of the smaller turrets that housed the ship’s secondary batteries was located not far from the lift, and this one had been completely wrecked during the battle.