Accord of Honor by Kevin O. McLaughlin Page A

firing more SABOTs until our heat scans show that we’ve killed every living thing on this ship. Surrender now if you want to live. Continue fighting, and you will certainly die.” I broke the connection. The ball was in their court, now.
    I ordered our crew to cease fire, but we still had our weapons trained into the smoke filled room ahead. Time passed. The chronometer on my HUD said it was under a minute, but it felt like hours. Ee saw movement through the smoke. Everyone sharpened their grip on rifles.
    “Hold your fire as long as you can,” I said over our tactical channel. “Give them a chance to surrender.”
    Give us a chance to get out of this with no more dead or wounded crew, I thought silently.
    A rifle clattered to the deck in front of us, tossed from the engine room. Another was thrown out the hatch toward us, and another, and another. The enemy crew came forward then, hands on their heads, faces grim and scared inside their suits. My squads took them into custody, using a set of zip ties to secure their wrists. And just like that, it was over.

    A sweep of the rest of the ship turned up another half dozen living crew. All surrendered. We had sixteen prisoners now, all men who would be instantly condemned to death by any court on Earth. What I was going to do with them, I wasn’t sure. For now they were left unsuited, bound hand and foot in our small cargo hold under armed guard.
    Their ship was a mess. We’d torn up their bridge with the SABOTs, and running the ship was going to be rough for a while. The first thing we had done was quickly patch the holes made by the missiles, our gunfire, and the airlock damage from the Indefatigable’s boost. Once that was done, we opened the damaged sections and got air circulating around the ship, and we could begin making repairs a bit more rapidly.
    The engines were still fine. We’d messed up one of their missile bays, and the repair on that conduit was going to take time we didn’t have. The other missile bay was still working OK, which gave us three active missile tubes. I wanted to go over their logs and communication station, both of which might have vital intelligence. But first I needed to check in with my own crew, make sure everyone was OK, especially the folks down in medical getting treated.
    Our medical center was a small room, pretty much like the wardrooms crew bunked in around the rest of the ship. Folded cots lined the walls and nominal ceiling, strapped to the bulkhead sturdily. A yank on a pull strap would pop them loose from the wall, and the cot would lock itself out once it had swung to ninety degrees from the base. The floor was left clear, both to store things and for mag boots to work well. Field surgery was a delicate process, and we wanted our medics to be able to lock themselves down to the floor for greater leverage instead of floating about. Zero gee medicine was a tough field.
    As I walked in, eight beds were in use. Four of those were bodies wrapped in the long black bags I had hoped we’d never need to use. The other four were crew who were too injured to be returned to duty. I’d been informed on the way down that we had another eight crew who had sustained minor injuries, ranging from sprains to a few minor broken bones, mostly ribs where rounds had smacked into armor. Chief Acres had brought along ten extra troops for the attack in the hopes that we could board the station with them. But our casualties had dropped the effective crew compliment down to twenty four uninjured and eight walking wounded. We could run the ship with half that, but not at peak efficiency. Our margin for another boarding was fairly slim.
    Acres was one of the wounded. The field surgeon we had on board was working on someone in another cot right now, so I turned off my mag boots and floated up to where the Chief was laying. He wasn’t conscious. An enemy shot had hit him in the belly. The round slipped between the armored plates there and dug into his