CHAPTER SIX

Fire tore at Richard’s body, his clothes, pierced his flesh. With every step, panic threatened to overwhelm him.

Somehow, he pushed forward.

The door’s control box should have been posted on the bulkhead at chest height, fifty centimeters from the hatch. Had to reach it, had to—

He stumbled over something—

(control box)

—and went sprawling. It was like falling face first onto a sizzling grill. His skin was blistering, melting. He screamed and scrambled to his hands and knees, reaching back, frantically trying to find the control box.

Could not see through the swirling black smoke.

He reached forward with a trembling hand, trying to find it—

There. It was like sticking his hand into a furnace. He gritted his teeth, imagining he could feel his skin as it burned against the box’s blistering metal casing, his flesh bubbling.

He found the top button, stabbed it down.

Nothing happened.

No, no, no.

The garage door was protected by armored blast doors. If he could not get them open, his plan would fail.

He stabbed the button again and again, feeling a desperate terror rising within him. Maybe the disaster had cut the circuits or destroyed the power supply or the fire had melted the leads or—

And then he heard the low rumble of the blast doors slowly pulling apart. Finally.

He scrambled free of the fire—

(Just like Paula.)

—And fell to the deck, rolling, smothering the flames. For a moment he just lay there, fighting for breath through the plastic face mask half-melted to his face.

He forced himself to his hands and knees and then struggled to his feet.

Crack. Crack, crack.

Richard froze. Gunshots. He had spent enough time at the business of war to know the sound when he heard it.

He had assumed this was some kind of terrible accident, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was an assault.

But what enemy would dare attack a Ghost Bear WarShip?

He crawled along the deck, keeping low.

Crackcrackcrackcrack.

Something stung his left shoulder blade.

His enemy had put a round in his shoulder. Richard expected to die in the next moment. His attacker only had to drop his aim a millimeter or two and that would be that.

Richard looked up, but he could see little through the shifting smoke. He crawled forward, hoping his progress would throw off the attacker’s aim.

Crack, crack.

And then his right hand brushed against something metal. He glanced down and saw a long-range missile on the deck, its guidance fins crushed.

Suddenly, Richard understood. His stomach tied itself into a tight knot.

Stravag!

When the weapons rack had hit it had spilled its lethal contents out on the deck. No one was shooting at him. The fire was cooking off rounds. The broken ammunition rack must have scattered ordnance across the cargo doors: grenades, autocannon shells, bullets.

Missiles.

If the fire grew larger, if it touched off that ordnance—

He shook his head. Time was racing down to zero.

If there had been a shooter aiming for him, he could have sheltered behind a fallen crate or an overturned truck. He could have fought back. But there was no way to protect himself from the random danger of rounds cooking off. No tool he could use, save speed.

He rose into a crouch and ran forward.

The body bag was a couple meters away. He knew there was nothing in it but EBUs and emergency equipment, but looking at that black length of plastic stretched out on the deck he could almost believe it contained a body.

He ran towards it.

He knelt down, frantically pawing through the material in the body bag until he found the laser cutting torch. The torch looked a lot like the sidearm tucked into Richard’s shorts. It sported a pistol grip and a trigger guard, and it was fashioned from black gun steel. Except the barrel was not steel; it was a dull gray titanium alloy. And a helical cable stretched from the butt of the pistol grip to a portable power pack.

Crack, crack.

He felt the air stir as one of the rounds whipped by, millimeters from his face.

Richard hauled the power pack out of the bag with one hand and reached for the torch with the other. He touched the power stud and the device hummed to life. A long blade of sapphire light shot out from the device’s tip.

He moved a couple meters from the bag, moving towards the fire, and sliced through the cargo hatch with the torch. Wind tore at his body as it rushed towards the breach. A high, thin keen arose, the air protesting its banishment. Richard struggled to enlarge the gash, swinging the laser torch around until he had a ragged hole.

Air howled as it fled towards the little hole.

At first, the gale fanned the fire and the flames leapt higher. Then the wind started to entrain the burning fuel, picking it up and carrying it to oblivion. A vortex of fire and smoke swirled down the hole.

Richard sprinted across the door’s surface, giving the hole a wide berth. The differential pressure across the breach would generate hundreds of newtons of force, enough to throw a man down and smash his bones against the steel deck.

He stooped and cut a second hole in the door, across from the first. He moved as close as he dared to the fire and cut a third.

All around him, the fire was dying as its living breath was sucked out into space.

Richard dropped the torch to the deck and went back for the body bag. As the flames died, he ran along the trench, looking for survivors, ignoring the danger of random gunfire. He pushed aside charred lengths of blackened wood, crawled through the near-scalding petrochem soup to peer beneath an overturned jeep, threw boxes aside.

He pulled away a blackened tarp and found François Cote underneath. The Star Colonel was unconscious, his uniform burned in patches, the exposed skin on his hands and face reddened and blistered. His face was the color of ash and his skull was matted with dried blood the color of brick.

But he was alive.

Richard quickly got an EBU over the Star Colonel’s mouth and nose, and injected a syringe of stimulant and painkiller into his arm.

Color slowly began to return to Cote’s face.

Richard wanted to stay with the Star Colonel, but if there were any other survivors, he would have to get to them quickly. He squeezed Cote’s shoulder, hoping the man could somehow feel it.

Then he returned to his search, looking through the debris for survivors, his heart filled with frantic hope. He pulled up a pallet and—

All his hope died. The warrior whose body was nestled beneath the pallet had been so badly burned that Richard could not tell who it was. The man’s skin was charred and blackened. The corpse’s head was bowed, his hands closed into fists and held up in front of its face, frozen in a final posture of terror.