by Rick Partlow
“Yes, I do,” I said, eyeing the Rangers, mostly out of old habit. I’d always trusted the Delta team to know their job, but the Rangers had been an unknown quantity at first. By now, I knew that at least this platoon was squared away. Even Landry had gotten better since his baptism by fire and his first purple heart, though everyone else insisted on calling it the Purple Foot. “And there’s no point on dwelling on it, right?”
“No, I suppose not.” He slapped the ramp control. “Hard vacuum warning.”
A klaxon in our helmets told the same story, but even over it, I could hear the beginnings of the air rushing out of the gap in the belly ramp of the shuttle. Both faded quickly and we were flooded with silence, the absolute darkness of sunless space creeping into the interior of the shuttle, battling for supremacy with the interior lights, the blackness attenuating the glare.
Pops ducked under the ramp before it was halfway open, jumping out two meters up and landing with an eerie lack of sound from the impact. Preacher and Ringo followed him. Dog held the others up, waiting until the ramp was all the way down while the first three out checked security.
“Nothing out here,” Pops reported. “We’re clear to the airlock.”
It galled me not to be out there with them, not to be the first out the door. If it had just been us, just the Delta team and me, I might have done it. They were savvy enough to make allowances for their crazy Marine commander. But with Landry’s platoon and the Space Force crew along, I had to actually act like a senior officer and try to keep all the ants running in the same direction. I waited for him to chivvy his soldiers down the ramp then clomped down next to him, waving for the Space Force crew to follow.
The Rangers formed a perimeter on the bare metal landing pad, watching the surrounding structures for any threats, despite the fact there was no way in hell the enemy could have reached this area from the opposite side of the drydock yet. I didn’t complain. It was good practice to do the right thing even when you knew it wasn’t necessary, and it gave them something to do. They were Army, and worse than that, Rangers, and if there was anything you didn’t want, it was a bunch of bored Army Rangers with guns and explosives wandering around aimlessly.
The Delta team was pulling security around the airlock, Pops standing by the controls, waiting on my okay. I counted the Space Force crew twice, making sure all of them had made it off the ramp and no one was running back on board because they’d forgot their issue tablet, because if there was anything worse than bored Rangers, it was Space Force crews trying to do anything tactical.
“Gunfighter One,” I called up to Lee, “we’re clear.” The ramp was closing before the last syllable escaped my throat.
“Copy that, sir,” Lee drawled. “We’re going to go strafe the shit out of those docked shuttles and make sure there’s nothing left of them for the Gomers to ride home after you chase them out.”
Shuttle One’s belly jets were nearly invisible in the vacuum, just a glow near the exhaust vents lifting her off the pad even as the next aerospacecraft touched down less than fifty yards behind her. That would be Brooks with two more platoons of Rangers and the second Space Force crew. The third was a glowing dot just slightly bigger than the surrounding stars, carrying the last two platoons or Brooks’ people and the only heavy weapons we’d brought along on this mission. Normally, the Delta team would have a couple of the plasma guns, but this was our drydock and our ships and we really wanted to avoid burning pieces of them to cinders.
“Status on the Strawbridge, Gunfighter One?” I asked while Lee was still in range.
“She’s free of the drydock,” he told me, “and making a course to support the Jambo.”
I killed my mic before I let myself sigh in relief. At least they’d made it out. Nine to two odds sucked, but not as badly as nine to one.
“Colonel Brooks,” I called, picking out her IFF signature from the other Svalinn suits loping toward us with stiff-legged strides, “I’m going to take Lt. Landry’s platoon with my team and Colonel Nieves’ crew to Ship Alpha.” Which was the code name we’d given to the ship with the functioning particle cannon. “You take Colonel Tygart and the others to Bravo and leave the weapons platoon up here to guard our approaches in case any of the enemy shuttles make it past ours.”
And yes, Dani Brooks was a lieutenant colonel and I was a major, but my position on the ship was superior to hers and I thought she trusted me enough not to question my tactical decisions.
“Copy that,” she said, and I didn’t detect any sign of her nose being out of joint. “That means you go right once we hit the main tunnel, and we’ll go left.”
“Affirmative.”
The Alpha ship was toward the center of the shipyard, while Bravo was back to what was referred to in the plans as the “north pole” of the structure, though what the hell that was supposed to mean in the context of a space station at the L-5 Lagrangian point between the Earth and the Moon, I wasn’t sure. It probably meant as much as me referring to the port bow of the Jambo.
I checked behind us and saw the last shuttle touching down, the ramp opening to disgorge the last two platoons.
“Open the lock, Pops,” I ordered, moving up beside him.
The Delta team was stacked at the door and I was grateful for the artificial gravity, because there was nothing quite as awkward as a bunch of Svalinn suits trying to perform a tactical entry using magnetic anchors, and I had seen that before in training.
Pops thumped the control, a pressure plate rather than a touch screen because of the vacuum, and the outer door of the airlock opened immediately. No cracking or computer penetration needed because it was our own security. The lock was set in what had looked from overhead like a pimple in the silvery surface of the drydock’s outer skin, but close up was a maintenance workshop of some kind.
“What’s this thing for, anyway?” Quinn asked. Checking the IFF, I spotted him at the edge of the perimeter out to my left, down on one knee.
“It’s for us to get in without having to fight our way in through the main docking locks on the other side of the station,” I told him, substituting dry humor for an actual answer, most of my attention on the Rangers checking the interior of the lock.
“It’s for performing exterior maintenance on this side of the station’s surface,” Julie told him, her laugh a burst of static in my headphones. “Don’t let Major Pain-in-the-Ass here fool you, he had no idea.”
“Honey,” I chided her, “not in front of the children.”
“Room for a full squad in here,” Pops said, half in and half out of the lock. “I could take the team through, make sure the other side’s clear, and radio you.”
“Negative,” I told him. “We don’t have time for that.”
“Then what do we have time for?” he asked, his helmet cocking to his side in tandem with his head.
I hadn’t discussed this part with him because there hadn’t been time…and because I hadn’t thought of it. But I knew the way these systems worked because I’d studied them. Continuing education as assigned by General Olivera for officer development. He’d been concerned I was promoted too early and wanted to make sure I fully grasped the systems I’d be working with. At the time, I’d considered it mostly a pain in the ass, but leaning over the control panel, I appreciated the knowledge.
“Everything has a back door,” I explained, happy that, for once, I could tell Pops something he didn’t already know. “Everything has an emergency override. The Helta thought we were nuts for including them, that there’d never be any reason for opening the airlock and disabling the emergency section seals, but we humans know there’s always a reason for crazy shit like that.”
It took three separate passwords, then an extra one because I couldn’t show my eyes for a retinal scan but finally, after warning me several times that what I was doing was contraindicated by safety recommendations, the panel flashed yellow and then red. If we’d been in microgravity, I would have warned the Delta team inside th
e lock to move out and stand aside, but against the one-gee pull of the gravity plates, even the blast of air rushing out of the open airlock door couldn’t knock over the heavy Svalinn armor.
I heard it at the first, the rush of air giving the sound something to conduct through, but the whooshing noise faded along with the blast of debris. Nothing big made it all the way out to the lock, just scattered bits of paper, cardboard and plastic, carried in a haze of dust. Before the last of the air had flushed out, the team was inside.
I held my breath as if I could hear gunshots or shouted warnings, my hindbrain unused to the idea of a hard vacuum mated with standard gravity, but there was nothing other than sharp, brief commands and reports from the team as they pushed further into the base. I tried to follow them on the schematic projected in my HUD, but it wasn’t a topographic map and one room looked much like another in the blueprint.
“Are we worried,” Julie asked me, “about whether the Space Force crew and the Helta engineers were suited up?”
“They should be,” I said, not sounding too convincing.
I’d thought about it on the flight over, wondered if there was any way to warn them without warning the enemy, but there wasn’t and I didn’t have the luxury of agonizing over the decision. If the crew was going by the book, they would have suited up the minute the enemy shuttles were detected. If they weren’t, I’d probably killed them.
“Clear to the first junction,” Pops told me.
“Landry,” I said, “I’m taking the crew in. You’re behind me.”
I didn’t know the other bridge officers Julie had brought along. They worked the off-shift or backed up the main crew and I didn’t make a habit of hanging out on the bridge when Julie and Olivera weren’t there. But they followed her lead and she followed mine. I kept my KE rifle at high port out of training and habit, not expecting any opposition because Pops wouldn’t have missed a bunch of Russian mercenaries waiting for us.
The corridors were broad and tall, the opposite of what I expected on a space station, but when you can pull power from fusion reactors and mineral resources from the Moon and asteroids, you don’t have to worry about conserving space, heat or oxygen. There was enough room for the Delta team to set up on all four corners of the junction, staggered on either side of the corridor and still leave space for the Space Force crew and me to get by. I held them up right at Dog’s position at the front of the group and waved Landry forward.
“Take point,” I told him, still trying to read the map. “The next junction is a hundred meters that direction.” I indicated our right with a slash of my left hand. “When we reach it, pull security and the Delta team will leapfrog your platoon.”
“I’m taking the other crew north,” Brooks told me, her people moving up, displacing Landry’s platoon as it moved to the front. “Good luck, Andy.”
“See you on the other side, Colonel,” I told her.
And then they were gone, disappearing down the hallway in utter silence. I waited until I was sure every one of them was through the lock, then I closed it behind us and set the air to recirculate. Why, I wasn’t sure. Maybe a guilty conscience and the idea that I’d trapped our own people in a pressurized compartment, or maybe it was the unnatural silence. Mostly, I think it was because air meant options, and I liked having options.
“You coming, boss?” Pops asked me, standing at the center of the junction, impatience obvious in his stance. “We don’t want to keep the Chinese Space Force waiting.”
I wanted to tell him not to wait for me, but I knew it was useless. Pops had this weird idea that it was his job to keep me alive.
***
I could hear my footsteps. It was a little thing, but it meant the air had returned. I hadn’t noticed the sound of it chugging back through the vents, but the echoing clomps of our footsteps told me the station’s air tanks had replenished the atmosphere.
It was the only thing that had changed, the only obvious measure of the time we’d been moving through the endless hallways of the huge facility. The cruisers were huge ships, hundreds of yards long, and the Delia Strawbridge had been between our airlock and Alpha, which meant we had more than a mile to hike, and the enemy would be there long before we were.
The base had a security platoon, but they were just Space Force Security Forces with M37 carbines, not Rangers in Svalinn armor. I didn’t have much confidence in their ability to hold off Chernobog, even in their cut rate Russian powered exoskeletons.
“Security halt,” Pops said and a drum-solo’s worth of pounding metal feet slowed to a halt. Rangers and Delta Force spread out to either side and I fought an instinct to go to the front.
That was something that I had never gotten used to, being able to talk normally and use the radio even in combat. Laser-line-of-sight was secure against the enemy picking it up and if the helmets weren’t soundproof, well, the thunder of our footsteps was better advertising than some muffled voices.
“Final junction up here, sir,” Pops told me.
Taking a knee beside Julie, I tapped into Pops’ helmet camera and saw what he saw. The map showed our position and even if it hadn’t, I’d been staring at it in overlay long enough to know. We were in the main corridor on what was nominally the west side of the base, a convenient way of referring to the section of skeletal metal scaffolding that stretched over the port side of Alpha. The section we were traveling through was narrow compared to the open scaffolding, just wide enough for storage bays of construction equipment, food, spare parts, space suits, and half of the crew quarters.
The crew compartments and storage bays were all sealed, closed automatically when the lock opened, and I just had to hope the workers had been smart enough to stay inside and keep their heads down. A lot of them were civilians, hired by Gatlin Aerospace, and if I hadn’t actually met quite a few of them, I would have thought they’d be running for cover at the first sign of trouble. The problem was, a lot of them were ex-military and tended to run toward trouble.
And you wouldn’t know anything about that…
We were at the final intersection now, the one we’d have to take east to get to the service airlock for Alpha. There were none on the west side. The only way onto the ship from over here would have been to jam everyone into the construction pods and try to fly over to one of the emergency airlocks on the hull, and I’d thought about that, but again, it would have wasted too much time.
Pops stared east from the intersection and I stared with him. The walls were grey and sterile, the hallway deserted. It seemed arrow-straight, but I knew that was an optical illusion. It curved gently but inexorably over the spine of Alpha, and when we topped the hump in that curve, the enemy would see us coming.
“Landry, your people are back on point. Move out.”
“You sure about that, sir?” Pops asked me. The channel was private but even then, the question was cautious and couched. Pops wanted his team out front and normally, so would I.
The Rangers were up again, stampeding forward, champing at the bit like untamed horses.
“Yeah,” I told him. “I’m going to need you and the team on board that ship to clear it.”
My reply was as vague as his question, but his quiet grunt told me he’d understood the implication. Whoever went first was going to take the brunt of the enemy attack and the brunt of the casualties.
“I’m moving up with the Delta team,” I announced on the general net, to let Landry and Pops know where I would be when the bullets started to fly.
“Andy,” Julie said, putting a hand on my arm. I didn’t feel it through the armor, but I saw it and turned back to her. She motioned toward my chest. “Give me your pistol.”
I blinked at her, wondering why she would ask that, then realized neither she nor the rest of the crew had been given the opportunity to draw sidearms. There hadn’t been enough time. Most of the Space Force types, I would have figured they were better off unarmed, since they’d probably never heard a shot fired in anger. But Ju
lie….
I pulled the Glock from its holster and passed it to her, then grabbed the spare magazine from the pouch beneath it and handed that over as well.
“You’re going to take the ship and run, right?” I asked her.
“You know me well enough to want to marry me, Andy,” she said, tucking the spare magazine in an external pocket and checking the load of the pistol. “What do you think?”
I wanted to argue with her, but that was a losing battle. And I already had one losing battle to fight.
“Love you,” I told her instead. “Follow me in.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Rangers had charged straight into hell, as Rangers always do.
I arrived twenty seconds after, an eternity in a battle, loping into a haze of smoke and expecting to take a machine gun round with every step. But the battle at this end of the corridor had ended, passed on toward the service locks, leaving only the dead behind. They were Chernobog. Their armor was thick, the suits superior to anything we could have put out two years ago, but bulky and primitive compared to the Svalinn, easy to spot. It would have protected them against the M37s of the Space Force Security Force guards, but it was nearly useless against the KE rifles. Tungsten darts had ripped chunks out of the chest plates, peeled away helmets, left nothing but fragile flesh once the illusion of invulnerability was stripped away.
I remembered reading a paper about the Soviet army during the early 1980s, the height of the Cold War. They’d issued “body armor” to their normal, frontline troops, but when the mujahidin in Afghanistan had gotten ahold of it and passed it along to the CIA, we’d discovered it was just cotton. The Soviets hadn’t been able to afford Kevlar. This wasn’t quite as bad as that, but the results were the same.
I counted four of them. A fire team, then. A bit less than a regular infantry fire team, but the suits were expensive. We’d shrunk our squads and they’d done the same. They’d probably been left near the junction as an observation post to watch for threats, and the Rangers had plowed through them like they weren’t there.