by S. Walker
The big man slapped his shoulder. "Same. Whatever the hell those things are, I'm fighting them from a fortification. Going down that-" he stopped, helmet cocked to the side. "You hear that?"
Jared did: Tapping. Louder and louder. He drew a deep breath to scream. "Incoming!"
Instantly all the teams pivoted, everything aiming downward over a carpet of metal bits. Nothing moved. "Where? Where!"
The tapping grew louder, a raging storm they had to shout over. Jared aimed the flechette gun left, then right, making sure no one was in front of his range. "I don't see anything!"
Louder. Hail on metal, now. World ending.
Someone in Bravo fired wildly, shocker rounds smashed into dented deck plates below. "Come on! Come at us, assholes!" Then everyone was shouting, threats and bravado competing with hailstones in a howling cacophony. Lyle screamed from right next to him, banging pistol to shield: "Bring it on!"
The Environmental ducts exploded downward, pouring a river of metal directly onto their emplacement.
The next fifteen minutes were lost in a haze of screaming, reloads and violent smashing. Power assisted armor was no joke, especially backed by training and melee weapons specifically designed for close quarters combat. Everyone paired up instinctively, ripping attackers off each other's suits and applying brutal levels of strength to rip them apart. Handhelds came into play, blasting triangular metal casings and steel cables with equal abandon, ricocheting off armor whenever a stray shot failed to hit the tide pouring over them. They fought like demons, giving as good as they got.
But the tide kept coming.
Jared's consciousness slipped in and out, giving him snapshots of images as he fought on pure, frantic reflex. He had scattered pictures of Lyle punching triangular drones with his bare gloves, knocking them off Jared's chest and shoulder-crushing them against walls with brutal force. Then he blinked and the scene shifted to himself using a riot shield like a deadly broom, blasting cable-whipping assailants off a fallen Security suited figure in wide sweeping blows.
Eventually the tide slowed, then stopped. He came back to himself half leaning against a wall, helmet missing and both gloves nearly shredded to pieces. Lyle stood nearby on trembling legs, fumbling a reload into his shock thrower with fingers that wouldn't cooperate. Everything nearby was covered in an ankle-deep drift of metal pieces, rising to knee high mounds over the suits of fallen Security figures.
"Holy..." he bent, holding onto the wall while hacking and wheezing for breath. "Holy shit."
Lyle collapsed in place, resting on his knees. "What are these? Where are they coming from?"
Jared motioned weakly down the ramp. "From the docking bay."
"But how... how are there so many?" He started awkwardly crawling to the nearest mound, brushing off metallic bits until parts of a Security suit peeked through. Lyle pawed through the pouches, looking for reloads or throwables.
"Don't... know...," he wheezed back. "But there can't... be that many... more."
He was wrong.
The next wave came ten minutes later. Less numerous and smaller in size, forewarning them both with an oncoming wave of tapping noises. Jared pulled the flechette thrower back, reloading and getting it away from the overhead ducts. With a full magazine he could firehose the entire wave at once, getting them as they flipped and tumbled up the ramp and then chopping the stream coming out of the vents. When he ran out Lyle took care of the leftovers with strafing shocker rounds, blasting them into wild spasms of burnt shell casings.
When the corridor fell silent they paused, looking at each other. Then got ready again without another word.
The fourth rush took longer and was even smaller: Barely a hundred cord-whipping triangles leapfrogging towards them, each barely bigger than their spread fingers. But without flechette suppressive fire the attackers were able to get into melee range again, applying their smaller whipcord cables with deadly intent. Lyle almost went down under the swarm as dozens targeted his legs at once; Jared only saved him by frantically ripping them off one at a time, whipping the small angular drones into the walls or deck hard enough to break them. "Fucking... fucking Angles!"
Lyle laughed hysterically, tired and loopy. "Triangles. Angles. I get it. Dead stars, I'm using that."
"Laugh it up all you like." Jared took huge breaths. "You got something better? Let's hear it."
"Nope. You've got this one."
The next wave was an hour coming, less than fifty strong and palm sized. They stomped them to death, sacrificing boot armor and leg material to preserve supplies.
Ninety minutes later they did it again, using broken shields and the last of the shocker ammo to kill the final units.
And now they were out of everything.
Jared collapsed down against the wall, armored butt hitting deck hard enough to jolt his spine. After a moment he weakly turned a wrist over to look at the console screen. "Shit. My console's busted. Does yours work?"
Lyle flopped next to him, nearly shoving the smaller man over. He showed the back of his arm: Shattered, broken pieces of screen stuck out everywhere around huge gashes, fluffy with insulation. "Doesn't matter anyway. If relief was coming they'd have been here by now."
"Well... shit."
"Yeah."
"We need to retreat. Resupply." He waved weakly down the corridor, away from the ramp. "Get more people."
Lyle nodded, eyes halfway closed. "That's a great idea. See you in a bit."
Neither man moved.
"...can't get up, can you?"
"Fuck off. I'll be fine in a minute." Jared's eyelids slowly dropped. "Just need to rest a bit."
"Probably nowhere to go, anyways. How many decks meet up with the cargo bay? Maybe they're all getting hit with drones."
They both thought about that for a bit, enjoying the quiet. Then Jared frowned. "Yeah, but is everyone kicking ass like we are?"
Lyle started laughing in weak, sporadic bursts. "No goddamn way. We're kicking all the ass. None left for anyone else."
Jared closed both eyes and grinned. "Damn straight. Ain't nothing getting through here with its ass attached."
"Hell no." He slowly held out one gloved fist, waiting until the smaller man bumped it with his own. "We got this."
Light tapping echoed up the ramp, reaching out like a promise of rain.
Chapter 24
Saving Your Assets
Lieutenant Jamet Reals-- Corporate Naval Academy graduate, former Middle Management Executive and co-CEO of the CES Kipper-- was about to ruin an Executive's entire career.
And it started with homework.
Jamet looked around the bridge, working through several likely approaches to contacting the station. A lot depended on what was available to work with communications-wise, from visual comms to radio-only exchanges. Worst case they'd have to actually dock somewhere with the Kipper and make a physical approach... which would be awful for a variety of reasons. Foremost of which was a lack of situational control. Jamet could see an uncontrolled rescue immediately turning into an outright ship hijacking unless some serious safeguards were in place.
But first: Options. "Engineering or Comms, I need advice."
"You're stuck up and need to learn empathy." Emilia's comment made the big engineer break up laughing.
"Thank you so much, Comms. I appreciate your honesty half as much as you deserve." The short technician parsed that with an expression halfway between confusion and suspicion. Jamet breezily kept going. "Is there any way to get a visual transmission to them? Any consoles working that could display, and could they transmit back?"
Janson wiped both eyes. "Not likely, ma'am. Power production would have been on th' central facility, broadcast to the ring around. Most efficient way t' do it. Even if they had screens left, they couldn't turn 'em on."
"Same for broadcast," Emilia piped up. "No power means no visual setups. We're getting audio because I'm borrowing all of the drone pickups on board in a giant listening net. That Inde
pendent could hear us this far out because... actually, I'm not sure." She frowned.
"High end skinsuit?" Paul offered. "Something personalized? An Independent could probably afford that, I would think."
"That's probably it."
"Alright," Jamet leaned both elbows on her broken console, chin cupped in one hand. "So it's audio-only messaging then, just as soon as we're in range of emergency skinsuit receivers. Which is about-" she pointed at Janson.
"An hour, ma'am."
"One hour." She thought about that, juggling timelines and organizing. "What's our overall goal?"
Captain Siers tapped the console. "I would consider it a win if we were able to rescue everyone left aboard the station." He seemed haunted. "So many lives lost, and it all comes down to inhumane decisions. Can you imagine?"
Everyone nodded. Even, surprisingly, Jamet.
"Alright, so the first goal is getting everyone off the station. That's a start. But what about afterwards?" She waved a hand towards Emilia. "Call me a bit coldhearted, but I'm feeling a bit vengeful about their Executive right now. Don't tell me you wouldn't like to see her sanctioned?"
"Damn straight." She looked bloodthirsty, lips pulled back over small white teeth.
Paul and Janson both agreed, followed by a thoughtful Siers. "What are you proposing, lieutenant?"
"I want to pull an authorizations list. Every time that Upper used her wrist ID to lock or unlock a system-- every time a hatch seal was opened or closed, all the emergency overrides, everything."
"Oh!" Emilia leaned forward over her console, grinning evilly. "Oh that would be amazing. Talk about indisputable evidence; that log list would have her fingerprints all over it!"
"That works, lieutenant-- bio chip ID cannot be faked." Paul looked impressed, long arms crossed over his thin chest. "Although I am not sure how to get a complete list. They have no power, remember?"
Janson groaned, baritone voice sounding let down. "That's right, ma'am. Records would have been on th' central facility with Management. It's a little bit missing right now."
"That's true," she agreed with both of them. Then Jamet smiled almost as evilly as Emilia. "But there's another place overrides are kept-- somewhere they have to be, or Executive overrides wouldn't work at all."
Janson looked up and to one side, a sure sign he was consulting his chip databases. "The overrides come from the Management network," he mused. "Then pass to the local net before-"
"The infrastructure list!" Emilia clapped. "Ha, beat you to it. Every authorized ID is in the list for hardware; that's how they're able to manually work the equipment even without power to transmit from a network. Just get close enough to NFE and trigger a lock or unlock."
Jamet grinned and tapped her own nose with a finger. "On the nose! Although I have to thank my time in storage for teaching me about Near Field Energy." She threw a wink at Janson. "Opening all those bins one at a time made me curious."
"That's right, forgot about it. An' it's true-- every one of those containers has a record of ya opening it. Ah could pull everything you ever took. But ma'am, ah hate to say it but we're runnin' into the same problem as before: No power means no network. Can't pull a list from every device without the net connection."
"I thought of that, actually." Jamet wristed her console open, then worked icons until she had a schematic of the habitation ring. Tossing it to the forward shared workspace, she gave control over to Emilia. "Comms, can you point out where the Independent was transmitting from?"
"I think? Hold on." Blue circles started appearing on the schematic, overlaying one at a time until a single place became noticeable. She tagged the section blue. "There. That's the transmission delays from every drone receiver we're listening with. The ship is just wide enough I can triangulate-- it's not a hundred percent accurate, but for a general area it works."
"Great!" Jamet took control back and rotated the schematic. The highlighted room was roughly a third of the way around the habitation ring, clockwise from where the Kipper was approaching. "Which way did their Independent say they've been moving the last few months? Was it clockwise or counter?"
"Counter, I believe." Siers reached forward and drew a half circle through the air, coloring the entire habitation ring from the highlighted section backwards. "Assuming they started at the Contractor and VIP living areas-- a good guess, considering our source-- here's the path the group probably took over the last half year."
Everyone considered the schematic, really drinking in the enormity of how much space it represented. If Siers' guess was accurate then the group they were coming to save somehow managed to transit nearly twenty miles of circular station. It was an incredible feat of survival, especially considering every single section needed repair work to be minimally habitable.
Jamet frowned, then tilted the schematic edge-on. "Wait, that's not right. The habitation ring is eight decks tall. Even more in some places like the docking and shipping areas. That is an incredible amount of space: Why do they keep moving forward instead of staying in one section and repairing it?"
Janson raised a big hand. "What kind of Executive is that Targer lady?"
"The bad kind." Emilia jumped all over that question. "Already looked her up: Human Resources. She's an HR-bot, about as low as anyone gets and still makes it into Upper Management."
He flipped his hand upwards in a 'there you go' gesture. "Then ah think she's got an authorization problem-- ah'm not sure about HR, but engineer Execs can only override the power an' maintenance hatches. Same for IT and Comms only havin' network access." He used both hands to draw a callout around the upper decks of the ring. "Ah think she can only open the common area hatches. Nothing down or up."
Siers was nodding along. "They have to keep going forward. All the communal areas connect throughout the ring. Even if they had time to force the hatches going downward their Exec wouldn't have authority to purge the atmosphere reserves there."
"Okay, that makes this easier then." Jamet ran an indicator around the top of the schematic, lighting up every hatch and Environmental subsystem going three quarters of the way around. "If these are the only hatches and areas we need records from it's less of a scavenger hunt."
"But how do we get the records without a network?" Emilia sounded frustrated, visor flashing a rainbow of colors. "Not to mention when we power up each area-- if we could power it up, the Kipper might be able to but that's a stretch-- the local gravity will come online and then we probably have a new problem."
"Right. We might wake up the... what are we calling them?" Paul seem bothered by nomenclature. "The attack drones?"
Jamet took control of the forward display and rotate it slightly to show the ship's approach. "We won't, because there's no need to power up anything-- Independent Thompson is going to get the records for us. Because we're going to dock here," she tagged a section halfway around the ring from the survivors. "And they're going to backtrack to us."
Everyone squinted, mentally calculating the distance. "LT," Janson started hesitantly. "Isn't that-"
"-kind of freaking coldhearted?" Emilia finished. "That's almost thirteen miles. Just when I thought you changed, you go and-"
Surprisingly it was Paul who cut off the irate technician. "Easy. Benefit of a doubt, Impossible-- why there?"
She flashed him a grateful smile. "Because anyone can pull the access logs if they want to, there's no restrictions on checking local records since you can't do anything with the data. It just takes an override to make anything work." Jamet tapped the area over where Independent Thompson broadcast from. "On the way back he can copy every bit of evidence, from every single compartment and hatch they pass. The Exec will literally be walking herself into a sanction courtroom."