Chapter 18 Chapter nine

Kassad tried the suit's radio.There was no echo, not even background static.He found the comlog wire, connected it to the ship's terminal, and got no response.The spaceship tilted a little more sharply, and the successive impacts echoed metallically.Kassad was knocked against the passage wall, and a transport wagon rolled over, its cables whipping at each other like the churning tentacles of an anemone.There were still a few dead bodies in the cage; there were more dead bodies tangled up the spiral staircase that still connected intact to the passage walls.Kassad struggled to swim to the last few meters of the cantilever passage, and found that all the airtight doors were sealed. The inside of the cantilever passage was closed by a baffle, but there was a large hole in the bulkhead of the main cabin, which was big enough for commercial use. The electromagnetic car drove in.

The ship pitched more and more and rolled more and more, imposing complex new rotational deflection forces on Kassad and everything in the tube.Holding on to the torn metal fragments, he slipped through a crack in the USS Merrick's triple-layered hull. He almost laughed when he saw the inside of the ship.Whoever attacked the old hospital ship did it brilliantly, stabbing and slashing the hull with a charged particle beam, and eventually, the pressure seals failed, the self-sealing units were damaged, the remote damage control was overloaded, and the internal bulkheads were destroyed. collapsed.The enemy ship then attacks the interior of the hull with missiles with special warheads, something that Air Force soldiers in the military often call it "stuffy tank shooting".The effect is like throwing a powerful grenade into a huddled group of rats.

The light shone in from more than a thousand holes in the wall, and hit the floating mist made of dust, blood droplets, and lubricating fluid, and there were colored lights refracted by these gelatinous foundations everywhere.Kassad hovered there, the ship rolling and rolling as he spun, and he could see more than two dozen corpses, naked and mangled, looking as if they were performing an elegant underwater ballet in zero gravity.Most of the dead bodies are surrounded by their own tissue and blood, forming their own little solar system.A few of them stared at Kassad, their eyes bulging from the pressure and staring like cartoon characters, their limp hands and arms beckoning him to come closer.

Kassad rowed across the ruins, intending to enter the command center through the landing route.He saw no weapons along the way, and it looked like no one else was gearing up except for the dead sailor, but he knew that there would be arsenals in the command center or in the soldiers' post at the stern. He stopped at the last pressure seal that had been torn away, looked there, and finally smiled this time.It turned out that there was no landing route in front of it, even the stern of the ship was gone, and the main body of the spaceship disappeared without a trace.The part of the cabin he was in, the cantilever and the medical ward cabin, a large piece of broken ship shell, had been ripped from the main body of the ship as easily as Peowolf had torn an arm from Grendel.In the end, leave the unsealed main drop passage door, and open the door to the universe.Several kilometers away, Kassad could see fragments of a dozen other USS Merrick writhing in the sunlight.A green and azure planet loomed in front of Kassad, making him feel a surge of fear of standing on a high place, so he clung to the door frame tightly.Just then, the stars moved above the edge of the planet, laser weapons firing their ruby ​​Morse signatures.Outside the vacuum vortex in the distance, half a kilometer away from him, there was a part of a spaceship that could still be digested, and suddenly exploded again, gasified metal, frozen volatiles, and tumbling black dots, all of which were melted into a ball.Those dots, he realized, were actually corpses.

Kassad rowed to the cabin, hiding in the messy ruins and thinking about the current situation.The suit would only last less than an hour now, and he could already smell the rotten eggs of the failing respirator, and he hadn't seen any airlocks or airtight chambers as he struggled through the wreckage. container.What if he even found the secret room or the airtight cabin?Kassad didn't know whether the planet below was Hyperion or Gardon, but he was sure that there was no military presence in either place.He was also sure that no local self-defense force could stand against the Ouster ships.So even if the patrol boat were to find this place, it would be a long time later.Kassad knew that the tumbling piece of garbage he was hiding now would slowly lower its orbit due to resistance, and it was very possible that they hadn't sent anyone to check it out, and its thousand dollars were crooked. The metal flakes have been wiped out in the atmosphere.The locals didn't like it, but, in their opinion, it was better to surrender such a small piece of sky to the Ousters than to confront them directly.If the planets below had simple orbital defenses or ground-to-space charged particle beams, he smiled wryly, it would make more sense for them to blow up the thing than attack the Ousters.

But for Kassad, none of this is any different.Unless he did something right away, he'd be dead long before those down there acted or the piece fell into the atmosphere. The shrapnel that killed the marine shattered the shield of the field of view magnifier, but Kassad pulled off what little viewing panel was left and put it over the visor.The indicators flashed red, but the suit still had enough power to display a zoomed-in view, with greenish lights flickering in spiderweb-like cracks on the screen.He saw the Ouster's torchship ship parked a hundred kilometers away, its defensive field obscuring the stars in the background, and then the ship fired something.Kassad immediately determined that these were the missiles used to deliver the killing blow.Knowing that his life was about to come to an end, he couldn't help but smile wryly.Then he saw the things flying at low speeds, so he zoomed in.The power lights were flashing red, the amplifier was about to fail, but he could still see tapered ovoids dotted with thrusters and blistered cockpits, each trailing six soft control arms that wobbled together. "Squid," that's what Air Corpsmen used to call the Ouster captors.

Kassad paddled deeper into the ruins.He had only a few minutes before one or more "squids" reached the piece of spaceship debris.How many Ousters would stay in that thing?ten?twenty?He was sure there must have been more than ten of them.They must be heavily armed and equipped with infrared detectors and motion sensors.The Ouster Elite is the equivalent of the Overlord Space Troopers, these commandos not only trained to fight in free fall, but also born and raised in zero gravity.Their elongated limbs, gripping toes, and prosthetic tails were added advantages in this environment, but Kassad felt they needed more.

Kassad began to rush back, carefully making his way through the tangle of metal mazes, suppressing the adrenaline rush of fear that made him want to scream in the dark.What do they want?prisoners of war?This really solved his current survival problem.If he wanted to live, all he had to do was surrender.The problem was that Kassad had seen military intelligence holograms of the Ouster ships they had taken from the ones that had escaped Brescia.It was a storage cabin, in which more than two hundred prisoners of war were kept.The Ousters were obviously curious about the Overlord's citizens, or maybe they thought it was too much trouble to imprison so many people and give them food, or maybe it was their ancient interrogation methods, anyway, anyway, the hologram showed that those Brescia Residents and military soldiers were skinned like frogs in a biological laboratory and nailed to steel racks. Their organs were soaked in nutrient solution, and their naked minds were ready to be questioned by interrogators at any time. , the rough cerebral cortex communication wires and shunt plugs were inserted directly into a three centimeter hole in the skull.

Kassad paddled forward, floating among the wreckage and the jumble of wires inside the ship.He had no desire to surrender.At least one "squid" was attached to the hull or bulkhead, and the rolling wreck shook violently, then steadied itself.Think about it, he ordered himself, what is needed now is a weapon, not a place to hide.When crawling from those ruins, did he see anything that could help him survive? Kassad stopped, suspended in an open space filled with fiber optic cables, and pondered for a while.The infirmary he woke up in, the bed, the slumber box, the emergency care equipment... most of it had been ejected from the breach in the hull.Cantilevered passages, lifts, dead bodies on stairs.no weapons.Most of the bodies were torn apart by "stuffy canister" explosions or sudden decompression.Those elevator cables?No, they are too long to cut without a tool.tool?He saw nothing.The medical office on the side of the corridor opposite the landing passage was looted, and there was nothing left. The medical fluoroscopy room, the MRI room, and the computer graphics area looked like a sarcophagus that had been looted.While at least one operating room remains intact, the interior is a maze of scattered instruments and floating cables.The sunroom, which was looted after the glass was blown outwards.Patient lounge.Doctor's lounge.Scrub room, corridors, unidentifiable rooms.And corpses.

Kassad stayed there for a while, cleared his mind in the tumbling maze of light and shadow, and then started to act. He expected ten minutes; but in reality it was less than eight.He knew that the Ouster would be efficient and effective in zero gravity, but he couldn't predict how efficient it would be.He staked his life on the Ouster search with at least two partners, that's the basic rule of a fleet soldier, as the Army jerboa at the Ministry learned, rushing from one door to another in an urban battle door, one burst into the room while the other provided covering fire.If there were more than two people, if the deportees were in a group of four, then he would definitely die.