by Marko Kloos
“Copy.” Sergeant Humphrey pulls herself up to the outer hull of the station and opens the external protective cover of the airlock control panel. Then she gets her PDP out of the pocket on her armor and attaches it to the data jack.
“As soon as that lock cycles, they’ll know they have visitors,” Gunny Philbrick says to the squad. “Through the outer lock, open the inner lock, and then into the pod by pairs. Humphrey’s team, left side. Nez, right side. Giddings, you have the tail end. And if you have to shoot in there, watch your fucking fire. Not a lot of space for stray rounds.”
“Head for the main control cluster,” I add. “Should be in the central pod. Secure any personnel and make sure nobody flips any switches.”
“Copy that,” Philbrick replies. “Ten seconds, Humphrey.”
“Stand by a sec. And . . . got it.”
Humphrey drops her PDP and lets it dangle by its data cord. The outer airlock door moves inward with a resonating thump. Then the door halves slide back into their wall recesses. Inside, the lights of the station’s airlock come on with a flicker. At least half a dozen green targeting lasers appear on the inner airlock door as Philbrick’s troopers bring their rifles to bear.
“Up and at ’em,” Humphrey says. She pushes off the wall, grabs the edge of the airlock hatch opening with one hand, and slingshots herself into the space beyond, aiming her rifle with her free hand. Behind her, the rest of the squad follows.
The feed from the squad’s individual helmet cameras turns into a collage of disjointed, rapid movements as the squad fans out into the station pod. The interior of the station is lit by overhead light strips, and the SI troopers have powerful helmet-mounted illuminators that add their lumens to the enclosed space, making shadows dance and washing out one another’s camera feeds intermittently.
“Pod is clear. Cover the tube.”
I hear the hard breathing from Philbrick’s squad as they clear the pod and then advance into the connecting tube that links this pod to the main section of the station. I see equipment racks, control panels, a desk with a coffee mug and a switched-off data pad on it, the trimmings of a boring garrison post on the ass end of nowhere.
I look at Humphrey’s feed because she is the trooper in the lead. She moves down the access tube methodically, shining her weapon light into every nook and cranny. Then I see movement in her field of vision—a human silhouette, right at the hatch to the main section of the station.
“NAC Defense Corps,” Humphrey shouts. “Freeze and show me your hands!”
She barely finishes the command before I see muzzle flashes at the end of the corridor, and the report from an automatic weapon reaches my ears twice—once from Humphrey’s audio feed, and then again muffled a fraction of a second later as the sound travels through the docking collar and the EVA lock of the Blackfly.
Several more rifles cut loose in the narrow passage. Their rapid reports make my audio feed go cataclysmic, and the computer dials down the volume automatically to preserve my hearing.
“Contact front!”
“Motherfucker!”
“Watch your fire, watch your fire!”
“I’m hit,” someone else adds to the chatter. I check the voice tag to see that it’s Sergeant Nez, in the middle of the group and on the right side of the wall. Two of his squad mates move up and over to him. There are too many troopers in too narrow a space, easy targets for someone at the other end to just hose down with automatic fire, but the SI troopers under my command know ambush drills and give back about five times as much as they’re receiving.
“First Squad, advance,” I shout into the comms. “Second Squad, cover Sergeant Nez and support.”
“On it,” Sergeant Humphrey shouts back.
First Squad rushes forward, charging out of the killing zone, textbook response to an ambush. The gunfire ahead of them ceases, and the hatch to the main part of the station closes just as Sergeant Humphrey reaches it and throws her weight against it. The hatch pops open again, but only a few centimeters. I see shadows moving in the space beyond. Someone on the other side curses, and the hatch slams shut again, propelling Sergeant Humphrey back into the connector. She shouts a curse back at the hatch.
“Blow the hatch,” Philbrick orders. “Right now.”
Two of First Squad’s troopers swiftly retrieve plastic explosive charges from their leg pouches and slap them against the hatch hinges. Then they prime them with remote detonators.
“Back,” Sergeant Humphrey orders. “Fire in the hole.”
The charges explode with a muffled bang and blow the door inward, where it lands on the deck of the main station pod, trailing wisps of smoke. The troopers from First Squad take no chances. As soon as the hatch hits the floor on the other side, Humphrey follows it up with a contact flash-bang grenade. It explodes in the main pod with a crack that’s loud enough to make my helmet’s built-in audio cut out momentarily. First Squad follows the flash-bang into the room not half a second after it explodes.
“Clear left!”
“Clear right!”
The main section of the station is empty except for scattered equipment and a body near the hatch First Squad just opened violently. It’s a male trooper in SI armor, wearing the rank insignia of a corporal. The dead trooper wasn’t wearing a helmet when the shooting started, and it looks like several fléchettes from First Squad caught him in the neck and head during the brief but violent firefight. His weapon lies nearby, a standard M-66 carbine just like my own SI troopers are carrying. Sergeant Humphrey picks it up, ejects the magazine block, and works the bolt to clear the firing chamber of the weapon.
“The fuck did they go?”
“Clear every corner of this place,” Philbrick orders. “Second Squad, move up. We have one enemy KIA, but there’s at least two more of theirs running around in here.”
“Three, I think,” Humphrey says.
“Suit controls say pressure’s dropping,” I warn. “You have air escaping somewhere. Someone must have shot through the station hull.”
Humphrey and two of her troopers check one of the nearby hatches leading to the next pod’s connecting tube. As she puts her hand on the release handle, there’s the unmistakable sound of explosive decompression on the other side, and the status light on the hatch panel jumps from green to red.
“Got a lot of air escaping nearby,” the drop ship pilot sends. “One of the other satellite pods, on the other end of the station from me.”
A new noise fills the station. It’s the ascending whine of a dual-mode engine going from cold start to operating pressure. The hull of the station shakes a little as the vibrations from whatever the engine is attached to transmit through the steel and alloy. On a table near Gunny Philbrick, a coffee mug starts dancing near the edge of the desk. It falls and bounces on the rubberized floor plates, splashing coffee against Philbrick’s leg armor.
“Blow that hatch open,” Philbrick orders.
“We’ll decompress the rest of the station,” Corporal Giddings says. “Nez has a busted face shield. He can’t seal his armor.”
“Second Squad, get him back to the ship,” I order. “Blackfly One, do you have a visual?”
“Negative. Angle’s all wrong. But someone opened a big hatch over there.”
“Second Squad, get Nez back to the ship now,” I send.
Something akin to an earthquake goes through the framework of the station. The floor shakes so hard that some of the troopers lose their footing and crash against walls or shelves inside the main module. The engines of the drop ship increase their pitch as the pilot tries to keep the Blackfly in formation with the airlock, which makes an unexpected leap sideways and upward with the rest of the station.
“We have a launch,” the pilot says matter-of-factly. “A shuttle just launched from the far pod. Small craft, looks like a Fleet mail bird.”
“Fuck,” I say to myself, loudly.
“He gets past the dark side of this rock, he can transmit our location.”
“I know,” I reply. “Goddammit. Do you have a bead on him?”
“Negative. I’m tied to the airlock and he’s moving away at a ninety-degree angle on my three o’clock. I only have guns.”
“Rogue Actual, Rogue One-Niner,” Corporal Giddings sends over the squad channel. “We’re in the EVA lock with Nez.”
“Lock the hatch,” I order. “Third Squad, secure that airlock now. Blackfly One, tell them to cut thrust immediately and keep radio silence.”
“Attention, renegade Fleet shuttle. Turn off your propulsion and keep your comms cold, or we will shoot you down,” the pilot sends out.
I check the video feed from our starboard hull. The firefly glow of the shuttle’s engine is already a few hundred meters away from the station. Right now, the bulk of the asteroid is preventing him from sending a signal out to whoever’s listening in the inner system, but as soon as he gets clear, he can scream for help as loud as he wants, and there won’t be anything we can do about it at that point.
“Don’t shoot,” the reply comes. “We are unarmed.”
“I don’t give a shit,” the Blackfly’s pilot sends back. “Cut your engine right the hell now.”
“Don’t shoot. We are unarmed.”
“He’s playing for time,” the pilot says to me. “Thirty seconds, and he’ll be in the clear.”
“Third Squad, status,” I shout into the platoon channel.
“Securing airlock. Ten seconds.”
“Hurry the fuck up. Blackfly One, cut yourself loose from the airlock and bring your weapons to bear.”
“I’ll tear the collar off,” he says.
“We’ll do an EVA recovery when the dust settles,” I reply. “Fucking do it.”
“Copy.”
“Airlock secure,” Third Squad sends, and I let out the breath I’ve been holding for the last twenty seconds or so.
“Blackfly One, go.”
The pilot increases thrust and pitches sharply away from the station. On the external video feed, I can see the soft gray tunnel between our own hatch and the station’s airlock stretch, then rip away from the hull around the airlock. The pilot cuts the collar loose from our ship, and it drifts away slowly as the drop ship picks up speed and moves away from the station.
“Twenty seconds until he’s clear. Coming around,” the pilot says.
I toggle comms to the Fleet emergency channel the pilot just used for his own transmission, and address the fleeing shuttle directly.
“Renegade Fleet unit, this is your last warning. Cut propulsion and come about, or we will destroy your ship.”
“Don’t shoot at us, goddammit,” the shuttle’s pilot replies, and now there’s more than a little panic in his voice. “We are unarmed.”
“Speed and direction unchanged,” our pilot says. “Fifteen seconds.”
“Goddammit,” I shout. On the optical feed, I see the shuttle rushing away from us, eager to reach the edge of the signal-blocking rock we are currently circling.
“Call it, Lieutenant,” the pilot says.
If I order him to fire, he’ll wipe out a ship that can’t fight back, and kill several people who aren’t shooting at me or mine right now. If I don’t give the order, they’ll scream down the house and alert the neighborhood, and a whole task force will come looking for us. They may come looking anyway, or they may not even hear the transmission. Too many mays and ifs for life-and-death decisions. And there’s no time to consult with Portsmouth or Major Masoud, who wouldn’t reply anyway because the task force is running under radio silence to avoid giving itself away. I have to make that call, and I have to make it right now.
I close my eyes.
“Weapons free,” I say. “Shoot him down.”
“Copy,” the pilot says, with what sounds like genuine regret in his voice. “Engaging.”
“For the love of God, don’t shoot! We are unarm—”
The Blackfly’s forward turret raps out half-second bursts of armor-piercing grenades. They’re meant for ground support use, not space combat, but a shuttle isn’t a tough nut to crack. The burst chews into the tail end of the shuttle and extinguishes the firefly glow of its engine. The plea from the shuttle crew turns into brief, disjointed screams before the transmission ends abruptly when the fuel tank or the engine or maybe both decide to let go. Almost a kilometer away, the shuttle disintegrates soundlessly. The pieces of the wreckage continue on their trajectory, driven by inertia, and quickly disperse in a wide cone of debris and frozen air. I don’t look too closely at the results of my order. I don’t want to see the bodies of the people we just killed, NAC troopers just like us, maybe people I’ve trained and dropped into combat within the last few years.
“Target,” the pilot says. “Splash one. Fucking idiots.”
I want to shoot back an angry retort, but part of me agrees, so I bite my tongue and hold fire.
“Gunny, frisk the place and secure the intel. We’re going to have to do an EVA transfer from the airlock once you’re done. Docking collar’s ripped to shit.”
“Understood,” comes Philbrick’s reply. “Give the Networks guy about thirty to do his thing.”
“Tell him to expedite,” I say. “Just in case someone noticed all the commotion. I want to be gone before we get bounced by some frigate coming to investigate.”
“Copy that. I’ll keep you updated.”
It takes the Networks guy twenty-one minutes to get all the data off the Neural Networks console in the station’s control center. By then, we are in the middle of an unfavorable rotation, where the station is pointed into the system interior and ready to send whatever updates they were burst-broadcasting every hour. This time, the transmitter stays quiet. We wait out the rotation until we are beyond the apex, and the station is once again hidden by the bulk of the asteroid that plays host to it.
Back in the cargo hold, the platoon medic is patching up Sergeant Nez, who took a fléchette through his face shield that shattered his cheekbone and sliced him open from the side of his nose to his earlobe. Despite the mess that is the left side of his face, he takes the treatment sitting down while joking around with the medic, even though I know from experience that this sort of injury hurts like hell. Four inches to the left and up, and Nez would be in a body bag right now, and yet he’s joking around as if the medic is merely patching up a paper cut. But I know why he’s doing it—I’ve been in the same place, and blowing it off with jokes is much better for your mental health than admitting to yourself how close you just came to getting your dog tags folded.
We retrieve the SI squads one by one by catching them with the open EVA lock of the drop ship, a retrieval method that takes much skill on the part of the pilot and a lot of courage and trust on the part of the troopers who have to push themselves out of the airlock of the station and into open space. But the pilot knows his job, and so do Philbrick’s three fire teams. Just before the next rotation apex, we have the whole squad back on the Blackfly, along with the data we came to take.
The trip back to the task force takes three and a half hours, lots of time for me to review the mission in silence and reflect on the choices I made. We don’t know how many died on the ship we shot down—more than two, and five at the most, which is as many as that type of shuttle can hold. Three to five KIA among the renegade forces—I still have a hard time designating them as “enemy”—and one wounded among our own ranks. We accomplished the mission with minimal casualties on our side, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a success to me. In fact, when we dock with our aviation pod in Portsmouth’s flank again, I feel like I’ve fucked up on a grand scale.
CHAPTER 19
“You had to make a tough call, Lieutenant,” Major Masoud says. “But it was the right call.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, even though I am not nearly as convinced as my company commander. I am standing across the holotable from him, and he is sifting through the mission data the drop ship computer uploaded to Portsmouth’s tactical network a lit
tle while ago.
“You kept EMCON and had your platoon execute a successful assault on an enemy installation. You retrieved the mission objective and eliminated a potential threat to the task force before it could become a problem. And you had no casualties of your own.”
“One wounded,” I object. “Sergeant Nez took a round through his face shield that broke some facial bone.”
“How’s the sergeant doing?”
“He’s in Medical right now, but the corpsman had stitched him together all right on the trip back already. He’ll have a nice scar to show off.”
“Good.” Major Masoud turns his attention back to the data stream in front of him. “You did flawless work on your first platoon leader mission, Lieutenant. For what it’s worth, your performance validates my choice to bring you on board. I don’t think the SEAL platoon could have pulled this off any better. Go square yourself away and take care of your troops. Dismissed.”
I salute the major and turn around to walk out of the ops center, strangely offended by my company commander’s praise.
Back in the platoon bay, Sergeant Fallon and Gunny Philbrick are supervising the post-mission gear maintenance. The quarterdeck—which is what we’ve come to call the open space between enlisted berths and the quarters for the platoon leadership—is full of troopers cleaning weapons and running diagnostics on their gear. The room is abuzz with the usual post-mission chatter. I look over the room for a moment, see that my sergeants have the place well in hand, and go back to my berth, where I close the hatch behind me and strip down for a long shower at maximum water temperature.
The hot water makes me feel marginally better. I’m in the middle of getting dressed in clean CDUs when there’s a knock on the hatch.
“Stand by for ten,” I shout, and finish buttoning up my CDU blouse. Then I walk over to the hatch and open it. Outside, Sergeant Fallon stands in the passageway, arms folded across her chest.
“How did it go?”
“We got it done,” I say. “One WIA, Sergeant Nez.”