The schematic rebuilt itself layer by layer to expand detail of the interior bulkheads and compartments, but there were no guarantees that she was stil configured that way. Piety was the same length overal as their own dropship, though, so it wasn’t like storming a frigate. Mal’s only worry was getting in and out without turning the Engineer into Huragok puree.
“So, once we’ve zapped her, we’ve got two options,” Osman said. “Board her, or haul her in and crack her open in the hangar.”
Mal looked at Naomi. She nodded. Devereaux nodded too and poked her forefinger down into the hologram.
“I don’t know how robust Engineers are, but sucking hard vacuum isn’t general y good for anybody,” she said. “This here is the only place I can maintain a seal with the docking ring. If we breach her hul out there, then chances are we’l kil the Engineer as wel . I’d rather take the risk of dragging the vessel back in here.”
“How upset are you going to be if we lose the Engineer, ma’am?” Mal asked.
“I accept it’s a risk,” Osman said. “If we lose it, then we use it—blame it on the Jiralhanae that ‘Telcam trusts. I’l think of something suitably devious. The question is whether we want a potential self-destruct on the hangar deck.”
“Wel , seeing as the best way to carry out an opposed boarding is simultaneous entry at multiple points, we’re stuffed. We’l end up venting their atmosphere anyway. I’m not saying we can’t take the ship, but there’l be a lot of ordnance flying around, we won’t know where the Engineer is until we get in there, and it might not survive until we find it anyway.”
Naomi leaned on the chart table with both hands. It creaked a little. Mal noted al the smal detail. So everything on board has got to be built to take a few hundred kilos of armored Spartan. No wonder the budget’s the way it is. She indicated a hatch near the bow.
“Mjolnir’s good for over an hour in hard vacuum,” she said. “What’s your pressure suit rated at? Fifteen minutes? Ten? But I don’t know if I can seal the hatch fast enough to avoid kil ing the Engineer. So I’l vote for bringing the ship inboard. It’s stil going to be an opposed boarding, but we have a little more time to do it sensibly.”
“Just thinking aloud,” Mal said. “What if they decide to blow the ship while they’re in the hangar, or they get their drives going, or fire their weapons?”
“Or decide to kil the Engineer rather than let us take it,” Vaz said. “Although that suicide harness is going to blow either way.”
Whichever way they cut it, Mal decided, the Engineer stil stood less than a fifty-fifty chance of survival. The only question was how much of a risk they wanted to take themselves. Port Stanley was designed specifical y for ONI’s kind of unorthodox warfare, but she wasn’t heavily armored and she probably couldn’t withstand a massive explosion in a hangar.
We could just blow up the ship, of course. At least that would deny them the asset.
But something deep in Mal’s core refused to let him walk away from this even if he’d been given the choice. When he looked at the faces of everyone else around that chart table, he could see that they were just as reluctant to pass up the chance.
If we’d captured some Engineers early in the war, we would have known exactly what Covenant weapons could do and how to counter them.
We could have used Engineers to develop better weapons ourselves. We could have stopped the war. We could have saved billions of lives.
Lose this one? No bloody way.
But he had to ask. “How come we haven’t got any Engineers already, ma’am? It’s not like we haven’t come across them before.”
Osman looked him straight in the eye. “We have. Or at least we had. We captured and defused one a couple of years ago and got some very useful developments out of it. But we need more than one. They repair one another, remember. And they make more Engineers.”
“Got to do it, then, ma’am.” Mal didn’t ask what had happened to the lone Engineer because he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more upsetting stuff about ONI. “What if we seal the hangar’s emergency bulkhead and do the business in the aft section with the doors open? We can repressurize fast when we need to. Devereaux, can you maneuver in that space?”
Devereaux nodded. “Bit tight, but probably.”
“If anything goes wrong, then at least most of the blast gets directed out, not in.”
“And you’re stil dead,” Osman said. “It’s your cal . If you think I’m going to get you al kil ed, then you tel me, and we just destroy Piety and sacrifice the Engineer.”
Mal was finding it hard to get used to voting on whether to attempt a mission. “But if we have a mishap, then the ship’s stil recoverable, along with BB.”
“Okay, do it,” Osman said. “Remember—once we hit it with an EMP, then we can’t hear their radio, and Engineers can fix things in seconds.
Unless the crew’s locked it up, then it’l head for the generator compartment to restore power, and it won’t think it’s being rescued. It’l try to hide.”
There didn’t seem to be many places to hide in Piety, but there was stil that explosive harness to worry about. Mal would usual y have planned a boarding like this down to the smal est detail and done a dry run or two before committing anyone to it. They didn’t have that luxury now. It was al on the fly, al guesswork and reaction.
Now he was starting to understand why ONI had assembled this particular team. He just had the feeling that he knew exactly how each of them would react and what they’d do in a given situation, planned or unplanned. Maybe the HR psychologists weren’t as useless as he’d thought.
On the sensor displays, Piety was tanking along at a sedate pace, oblivious of the fact that Port Stanley was now almost up her tailpipe. And she stil couldn’t detect the corvette.
“Okay, BB,” Osman said. “Show us the fly-through.”
The hologram schematics snapped out and were replaced by an exterior of Piety, Port Stanley, and the dropship. The display animated to align Stanley on Piety’s tail, then flipped her 180 degrees so that she was bel y-up to her target. The dropship took up position below Stanley’s upper hul and aft of the EMP cannon, the cannon fired, and the dropship shot forward and upward to maneuver onto Piety’s back and lock grapples on her. The EMP cannon fired a few more times, Stanley pivoted 180 degrees about her midships in a relative nose-down movement until she was facing the other way, and the dropship slotted straight into the hangar bay.
“Tel me the dropship’s hardened,” Devereaux said.
“Of course it is.” BB sounded indignant. “Like Naomi’s armor. But it’s a contingency measure. If one EM pulse keeps Piety disabled, al wel and good. If the busy little Huragok keeps fixing it every few seconds, then I keep firing. In which case, Naomi is best placed to breach Piety while I do that. If you go in, you’l lose your HUD and environmental controls, so you’l be rebreathing air and sweating a lot. Which gives you far less time to operate.”
Mal looked at Vaz. He shrugged. “No problem.”
Phil ips was very quiet, one hand to his ear. Mal could see waveforms of the various Brute voices on the display in front of him.