Falling through space doesn't feel like anything. There's no sense of acceleration, no feeling of motion, no wind rushing against you. Nothing.
I opened my eyes to see HMS Unicorn not below my feet, but above me, her prow passing over me in a great arc. Somehow, even though I had jumped away from it, I was now approaching it again as it rolled past.
From this perspective the damage to the prow was obvious, great gashes through the hull that showed the twisting passages within. The wooden planks lining the hull to ward off magnetic boots and bombs were streaming gases into the void, little fires spontaneously flickering on their surfaces and dying out just as quickly as oxygen pockets inside ruptured. The optical swivel guns on the masts were firing furiously at something below my feet, but the rest of the ship was quiet but for the tractor array.
I twisted my head around clumily to follow the beams, and there, rising under my feet like the sun over the horizon, was the enemy ship. Though they had been described as small, even a mere 600 foot long vessel seems truly enormous in these conditions. I was close enough now that I could see it in detail. It was made of a smooth metal painted in two tones of grey slashed across it like a zebra's coat. At the nose was a square perhaps six foot across which seemed to be made of many smaller black and white squares in a random pattern, but other than that it seemed unadorned by decoration. Compared to the yellow-and-black stripes, delicate carvings, and holographic flags of Unicorn, it seemed so plain.
But it was not without detail. As we got closer, I could see masts rising from its serrated edges, many of them dotted in strange spheres, grids, and wires that seemed to fly in all directions. Vents and structural beams broke up the surface, and I could see panels which were clearly meant to be removable.
I could see now how the ship would arrive in its spiral just in time for me to intercept it, and clumsily I tried to turn in the void so as to get my feet below me. I briefly wished I had been built as a cat so I knew how to do it.
The turret at the fore was flashing again, and the projectiles were zipping past me quite close. Then, several small blisters on the hull likewise began to spit fire, these a steady stream that curved toward me as the ship began to slowly slide into place. It looked as though I was going to land somewhere at the stern of the ship, near the rearmost blister, and whatever gunners or fire control computers existed on their vessel must have realized it too because the tracers came closer and closer until my screens were shimmering as they passed closer.
One of the swivel guns must have gotten range on it at that moment, because the firing stopped as the screen lit up around the turret, and then quite suddenly I felt a jerk as I passed through myself. I wasn't coming directly down onto the hull, because the forward momentum of the ship was making it slide below me. It'd be like falling from a rushing carriage onto the cobblestones. Unless I just bounced and flailed off into the void.
The hull got closer and closer, until I could see the texture of the metal, the tiny rivets holding the plates together. Then quite suddenly I hit it, tumbled, scrabbling against the surface for some form of handhold. My hand closed on something, a support beam perhaps, and with a great wrenching against the actuators of my shoulder I stopped.
I realized, as I hung there by one hand, I probably ought to have put my sword away. I reactivated the magnets on my boots and touched my toes to the hull, then pushed myself up off the plating, swinging out until my heels touched the plating and stuck fast. It seemed impossibly foolish that they wouldn't have some anti-boarding system, but here we were.
The gun blister was perhaps only thirty feet away, sitting on a little platform, rotating to track something as the fire dropped off. It fired a silent burst out into the black, accompanied by vibrations through the deck plates, and red-hot casings and smoke sprayed from the top of the turret and drifted away overhead. I followed the arcing tracers out, and winced as I saw some of them burst in a flash.
They were firing on my marines. I had to stop them.
Walking in magnetic boots was hard, running downright unnatural, but I scrabbled up the hull as the gun stopped, pivoted, and began firing again at a new angle which sent the casings pattering against me like hailstones. Something caught the light as it tumbled overhead, and I realized it was a Fusilier, wounded and spinning wildly, missing the hull as they rocketed off.
The gun shifted to a new target, pointing upward and exposing a chute of some kind under its chin, where long brassy missiles tipped in glass beads waited to be fed into the weapon. I swung my sword through it and the shells burst in the hopper, spraying me in a wash of metal particulates and heat. The gun shuddered and halted, then rotated to point directly skyward and begin to sink rapidly into the hull. I stole a glance inside just before the hatches closed, hoping to catch a glimpse of crew of some kind, but all I saw was dark machinery.
"Lieutenant! You alright there?"
I turned to see Sergeant Theo approaching with a strange sort of loping gait from the magnetic boots, his uniform jacket nearly blown entirely off his body, exposing a tapestry of lacquered tattoos. There was a terrible crater in the armour of his shoulder where he must have been hit, but he showed no signs of distress. Behind him other machines were approaching, most of them looking much better off.
"Right as rain, sergeant. We haven't much time, have we all made it over?" I asked. I heard a blip on the wireless as he switched channels, then came back.
"Um, well, it was a bit of a jump, but thirteen of us plus ourselves have checked," he said. I never got a proper count, but that meant at least half the marines hadn't. He must have seen this realization on my face, though, because he kept talking. "Chin up, ma'am. Once we take the ship, we can pick them up at our leisure."
"Right… I don't think we'll be taking much of anything. All we need to do is stop their engines, by whatever means we can. To start, we need to get inside the hull. Has anyone found any access panels or the like yet?"
"Nae ma'am, but we can make one given a moment." he said, gesturing to one of the marines, who produced a square plate with a semicircular device in the middle. This at least I recognized, a petard. We used the shaped charges from blowing open fortress gates, or fortress walls if we had to. This one looked smaller than I was used to, but I presumed it must be enough.
"There has to be working spaces for this gun, so this is probably our best spot. Right here." I indicated at the base of the turret, and two of the marines went to work slapping it in place. There were quick-fixing bolts on the corners of the plate, but without any anti-magnetic defenses at all they clearly weren't needed as the weapon afixed easily. We all took several big, clumsy steps back, then the lanyard was pulled.
There was a thud through the hull and the plate remained firmly in place. One of the Doras ran up and released the magnetic locks, and the plate drifted off, exposing the perfectly square hole in the hull of the vessel. The armour was not thick, perhaps only two inches of steel, then layers of what looked like foam and the thin pressure hull inside.
"Well, the plate didn't fly off, so no atmosphere inside," the sergeant mused.
"Maybe they depressurized their guns decks, like we do," I said, remembering the trip through the gun.
"Maybe."
I stepped up to go through, but Sergeant Theo put out a hand to stop me and indicated to another marine. The machine stepped up to the breach with his musket shouldered and drew out a bizarre weapon I'd never seen before, a collection of tubes on a stock with a baffled vent at the rear.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Volley gun, ma'am. Just the thing for close quarters, tis why it goes first." the private holding it explained. He pointed it over the breach for a moment, scanning for threats, then stepped in and seemed to be pulled through as the internal gravity asserted itself. "Clear, come on in. About one g, but it feels funny."
I might not have been able to go first, but I wouldn't be stopped from going second. I stepped toward the breach and dropped in clumsily, rolling around the edge of the hole and standing up in the hall. The hallway was perfectly square, with identical grating on the floors, walls, and ceilings, broken up by hatches or panels. The Irish marine with the volley gun was standing quite casually on the ceiling, pointing his weapon down the hall.
"You're upside down, ma'am," he pointed out.
"I could say the same," I replied. The other marines started dropping in through the breach. No matter which way they dropped through, whatever surface they landed on seemed to support them just fine. Sergeant Theo casually stepped from the wall he was standing on to what I thought of as the floor without pausing. "Oh, I don't much like this."
"Hardly the worst we've dealt with, ma'am. Marines, spread out, start looking for anything that might be controls or fuel lines. And… ma'am, what do we do about crew?"
Right, crew. There was still a considerable chance that this ship was manned, by alien beings. By people. Fusiliers didn't usually fight things that were people, and while it was abstract enough that I doubted many of the Wills and Wendys manning the ship's guns were agonizing over it, it would be different up close like this.
"If we run into one or two unarmed, stun them so we can figure out who or what they are. If they're armed, don't hesitate," I replied, doing my best to keep my tone even.
"Yes, ma'am."
We were soldiers, yes, but we were built to protect people during an age of peace. The thought was honestly somewhat sickening and I felt very much like I ought to rescind the order, that we ought to be more cautious, but there were more lives than our own or our enemies at stake. Programming be damned.
The marines began pushing down the hall, and I followed closely behind the volley gun wielding marine. The hallway went from moving toward the stern to suddenly turning upward, from my perspective, and we paused as Marine Téo with the volley gun leaned over the edge.
"How much do we have in the way of explosives?" I asked. The response, a handful of grenades and a few small bombs, wasn't encouraging. Apparently the ship's complement of rare transmutative charges had been spirited off to the front line ships alongside most of the marines. "I don't think the engine room is the call, then, we might not be able to damage it enough. But the quarterdeck ought to be there too, right?"
"Wouldn't be so sure, every ship is different. Usually they're well buried inside, but that's about all you can say." Sergeant Theo said, "But you're likely right, we'll have to-"
"Movement down the hall!" Téo called, then suddenly jerked back and collapsed to the ceiling above us, his weapon falling heavily at my feet. His head was bent unnaturally back and there was a smoking hole in the screens of his eyes, the other a dancing multicoloured smear before going black.
"Marines, back, back!" I called, leaning out to snap off a shot blindly with my pistol. A quartet of small explosions rippled nearly all at once against my shield as I did, pieces of metal peppering me through it and getting caught like burrs against my uniform. "Sergeant! Grenades!"
"Aye!" Sergeant Theo and another marine pressed forward, climbing onto the walls to either side of the vertical hall, and as one they depressed the fuses on their grenades and hurled them down the hall. They were met with a storm of smokey tracers which sparked against the metal all around us, then there were a pair of dull thuds through the bulkheads.
Thinking only that I had to follow quickly behind the grenades, I stepped out into the hall and jumped up, falling with a twist and sprawling heavily against the corner of two bulkheads and rolling down the hall. I pushed myself to my feet as quickly as I could and looked for movement, pausing as I saw the shape of a Theo coming through the smoke. I must have gotten turned around in the tumble, so I turned to face the foe.
There were the marines behind me, scrambling into the hall, unmistakable in their red coats. Then something hit me from behind, hard.
I staggered and turned, the impacts sparking off my screens. Missiles were bursting inches from my face or ricocheting off against the walls in a wild weave of smokey lines, and the shooter pressed out of the smoke. It was a machine alright, familiar in proportion, but now that I could see it properly everything about it was wrong. It was made of a dark metal, patterned like the hull outside, but its pieces were angular and raw, inhuman in shape. There were visible pistons and heavy rivets across its form.
It had no face, just two square, soulless lenses, locked on me.
