CHAPTER 28
Six against one were impossible odds. Especially when the six were battle cruisers, twice the size and firepower of the Apollo.
I looked at the stricken faces of the bridge crew. They had been prisoners of the Skorpis once before.
“They’ll freeze us,” muttered Emon.
“And serve us for dinner,” said Jerron, trying to make a joke of it. No one laughed. They all looked grim, frightened.
“They’re not going to take us alive,” I told them.
“And that’s the good news,” Frede wisecracked. Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.
Our one chance was to make it down to the surface of Loris before the Skorpis ships could destroy us. I turned the Apollo in that direction, hoping that the orbiting battle stations could pick off some of the warships hounding us.
“Take power from the weapons batteries,” I told Jerron. “Put every bit of power we’ve got into the engines.”
Emon looked unhappy that his weapons were being drained. I started to say, “Keep the shields—”
The ship was rocked by several hits. Then a massive jolt slammed into us, knocking me against my seat harness painfully.
“Nuclear missile,” Dyer yelled out.
I looked at her screen. The engine section had been hit.
“Screens absorbed most of the energy,” Dyer reported, “but the hull’s buckled. Section eighteen, deck two is open to vacuum.”
“Seal it,” I snapped.
“Automatic,” she replied.
The ship shuddered again.
“They’re hitting that section,” Frede said, almost calmly. “They’re trying to knock out our engines.”
I jinked the ship back and forth, trying to keep their laser beams from overpowering the screen shielding the engine section. But the weapons of six battle cruisers all firing at us were impossible to evade entirely. Apollo bounced and shook like a rat in a terrier’s jaws.
One of the Skorpis cruisers blew up, victim of a Commonwealth station’s guns. But the others pressed their attack even harder. One of my display screens sputtered and went dark. The overhead lights flickered fitfully.
And the surface of Loris still seemed to be a million light-years away. We were diving toward that blue and white planet, hoping desperately that the Commonwealth defenders would allow us through their planetary screen and shoot the Skorpis warships off our back.
“Power drain exceeding safety limits,” Jerron said tensely. “The shield isn’t going to hold up more than another fifteen seconds.”
“More nuclear missiles on their way!”
I saw them in the main display screen and turned the ship to avoid them. But their guidance sensors had locked on to us.
“Hang on!”
Three explosions hit us almost simultaneously. Display screens burst in showers of sparks all across the bridge. The lights blew out. Acrid smoke filled the darkness.
The red emergency lights came on. In the dimness I saw that the bridge crew was still alive, though we would all have bad bruises from our safety harnesses.
“Power’s gone,” Jerron muttered.
“We’re dead meat.”
“Not yet, we aren’t,” I said, unbuckling my harness. “They said they wanted to take us alive.”
Frede smiled grimly. “Break out the rifles and sidearms,” she said. “We’ll make a fight of it.”
A wild thought spun into my mind. A memory of ancient days when sailing ships grappled and sent boarding parties to seize their opponents. The Skorpis were going to board us, I knew. What if we ambushed their boarding party and then seized their battle cruiser?
“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “We don’t have much time.”
As we were passing out the hand weapons to the entire crew we heard the thump and clang of a Skorpis ship mating its air lock to our main hatch. With our sensors down, I could not tell if it was a shuttle craft or one of the battle cruisers.
“If that’s a shuttle,” I said, “there can’t be more than twenty or thirty warriors on board.”
“More likely it’s a battle cruiser,” said Frede. “They wouldn’t risk a shuttle with all the shooting going on out there.”
“And they know they’ll need more than thirty warriors to take us down,” Emon added, trying to sound cocky.
“Good,” I said. “Then after we finish the boarding party we can take over their ship.”