Free Space Captain Smith by Toby Frost Page B

Ghast boarding party rushed at them. Bullets and white beams turned the docking tube into a maze of light. Carveth saw something rush out from the mist, limbs whirling, and she racked the slide and shot it in the chest. It roared and fell, and a thing like a vast insect rushed along the wall, and she blew that apart before it could clear the mist and she would have to look at it. Smith’s gun ripped out and a row of them fell, more of their comrades scrambling into the gap. Rhianna screamed.
    The round counter spun down to zero and Smith tore out the ammo drum and slapped a new one into place.
    ‘Score one for Blighty!’ he yelled, and he opened fire. Disruptor shots hit the box beside him and it melted and collapsed.
    Something new appeared in the fog: sparking lights, the business ends of shock-sticks. ‘Aha!’ Suruk cried. ‘Proper fighting!’, and for the first time one of the Ghasts cleared the fog and leaped on them.
    Carveth only caught a glimpse of it – the goggling eyes in a skull-like face, the long coat, the antennae poking through holes in its steel helmet – and then Suruk whirled in front of her and sliced off its head. They kept firing: the enemy swarmed forward, frenzied.
    No time for aiming now. Smith kept his finger down and raked the corridor from side to side. The light in the docking tube was blocked out by the rush of Ghasts. Suruk hurled a knife into the horde, Carveth pumped and fired until her gun was dry and her terrified fumbling fingers snatched the revolver from her belt. Smith threw the cannon down. ‘I’m out!’ he cried, and they heard the hiss as he drew his sword. Suruk held out a bomb to Carveth, she lit the rag and he hurled it into the corridor. There was a flash of fire, and he threw another, and suddenly there was nothing alive in the docking tube. Silence from the Ghasts. Nothing moved in the passage except smoke. Smith looked at his crew. ‘They know we’re out,’ he said.
    Rhianna was bolt upright and shaking. ‘Why don’t they attack? Why don’t they attack?’
    ‘They wish to make sure,’ Suruk said, and as he did a fresh batch of raiders ran into the light and charged at them.
    Suruk roared and leaped into the gap. Blades whirling, he felled one and then another as they tried to swarm over him to the humans beyond, calling out the names of the techniques he used as he cut down his enemies. Distantly, he heard Carveth’s revolver going off and sensed Smith at his side – but that did not matter. He was in the spirit world, running with his ancestors, feeling them guide his spear.
    A trooper leaped the boxes and knocked Carveth to the ground. The revolver bounced out of the simulant’s hand. The Ghast grinned down at Carveth, flexing its pincerarms. Carveth gave in to fear and howled. Rhianna stared at it, horrified. Something happened to her with the slow certainty of a dream. The wooden sword rose in her hands, drew back, and she dropped in a position she knew only from Tai Chi. The sword whipped out and struck the Ghast in the head.
    The trooper stumbled but its claws lashed out for her. She did not move – the geometry of the universe shifted – and somehow they missed, swiping through air where her body should have been. It lurched aside and, as Carveth grabbed the revolver and swung it up, the trooper’s head was in her sights.
    The world was slowed: to Carveth, it seemed like a dream. She fired, killed one Ghast and blasted the next as it lumbered into range. Suddenly it was rather easy, and somehow, she knew that Rhianna was making it so. Rhianna blinked and was awake again. The enemy were gone. Smith was calling to them all, asking who was hurt. Suruk stood surrounded by spidery bodies, bellowing in triumph. Carveth had a finger up her nose. And voices were answering Suruk’s calls – not Ghasts any more, but the M’Lak, his friends.
    ‘It was most excellent,’ Thador Largan told Suruk forty minutes later. ‘We got the prow right in place