Guardsmen of Tomorrow by Martin H. & Segriff Greenberg, Larry Segriff

can perform some amputations.”
    More animated laserfire crisscrossed the holobubble. Ours was colored blue; the aliens‘, an appropriately sickly green.
    “We’ve got the casualty reports from that last torpedo hit,” said Champlain. “Eleven dead; twenty-two injured.”
    I couldn’t take the time to ask who had died-but I’d be damned if any more of my crew were going to be lost during this battle.
    The computer had numbered the two remaining Nidichars with big sans-serif digits.
    “Concentrate all our fire on number two,” I said. The crisscrossing lasers, shooting from the eleven beam emitters deployed around the rim of our hull, converged on the same spot on the same ship, severing one of the three connecting struts. As soon as it was cut, the beams converged on another strut, slicing through it, as well. One of the cylindrical modules fell away from the rest of the ship. Given the plasma streamers trailing from the stumps of the connecting struts, it must have been an engine pod. “Continue the surgery,” I said to Nguyen. The beams settled on a third strut.
    I took a moment to glance back at the Rhamphorhynchus and Quetzalcoatlus . The Altairian singleships were swarming around the Rhamphorhynchus (colored blue in the display). Peter Chin’s lasers were sweeping through the swarm, and every few seconds I saw a singleship explode. But he was still overwhelmed.
    Heidi, aboard the Quetzalcoatlus , was trying to draw the swarm’s fire, but with little success. And if she fired into the cloud of ships, either her beams or debris from her kills might strike the Rhamphorhynchus .
    I swung to look at the hologram of Peter’s head. “Do you need help?” I asked.
    “No, I’m okay. We’ll just-”
    The fireball must have roared through his bridge from stern to bow; the holocamera stayed on-line long enough to show me the wall of flame behind Pete, then the flesh burning off his skull, and then-And then nothing; just an ovoid of static where Peter Chin’s head had been. After a few seconds, even that disappeared.
    I turned to the holo of Heidi, and I recognized her expression: it was the same one I myself was now forcing onto my face. She knew, as I did, that the eyes of her bridge crew were on her. She couldn’t show revulsion. She especially couldn’t show fear-not while we were still in battle. Instead, she was displaying steel-eyed determination. “Let’s get them,” she said quietly.
    I nodded, and-
    And then my ship reeled again. We’d all been too distracted by what had happened to the Rhamphorhynchus to notice the wake moving through the cloud of expelled gas around our ship. Another stealth torpedo had exploded against our hull.
    “Casualty reports coming in-” began Champlain.
    “Belay that,” I said. The young man looked startled, but there was nothing I could do about the dead and injured now. “What’s the status of our cargo?”
    Champlain recovered his wits; he understood the priorities, too. “Green lights across the board,” he said.
    I nodded, and the computer issued an affirming ding so that those crew members who were no longer looking at me would know I’d acknowledged the report. “Leave the Nidichars; let’s get rid of those singleships before they take out the Quetzalcoatlus .”
    The starfield wheeled around us as the Pteranodon changed direction.
    “Fire at will,” I said.
    Our lasers lanced forward, taking out dozens of the single-ships. The Quetzalcoatlus was eliminating its share of them, too. The two remaining Nidichars were now barreling toward us. Kalsi used the ACS thrusters to spin us like a top, lasers shooting off in all directions.
    Suddenly, a black circle appeared in front of my eyes again: there had been an explosion on the Quetzalcoatlus. A stealth torpedo had connected directly with one of the Q’s three engine spheres, and, as I saw once the censor disengaged, the explosion had utterly destroyed the sphere and taken a big, ragged chunk out of the