Against The Middle

by Caleb Wachter

  He gave a harsh chuckle, “See you on the other side, McKnight.”

  “This is Team Turnover, out,” she said, severing the link.

  A moment later, the ship lurched as the shuttle hangar’s pressure doors were opened using emergency protocols. The escaping gases sent the Pride into a tumble and, with any luck of the good variety, the sudden lurch dislodged a few of the boarders who meant to violate their ship and take whatever they pleased in the process.

  But Gnuko was ready for the boarders. He and his people had worked through this scenario so many times he knew that any of his team leaders—including Paulus—could take command of the mission at the drop of a hat.

  “Remember,” Gnuko said when a second alarm went off, indicating that the port airlock had been breached, “no heroic stands. Fall back and use embedded resources whenever possible but, no matter what, keep the enemy moving forward. We’re going to chew these bastards up and spit them out while that one-eyed freak does to their ship what they think they’re about to do to ours.”

  His team leaders acknowledged, and a few seconds later Britt reported, “Contact.” The sound of muffled weapons fire chattered over the channel for several seconds before there was an explosion. “Three hostiles down to one friendly,” Britt reported quickly, “hostiles are wearing standard Confed power armor, but using mono-locsium axes. We’re falling back to junction B-5; get ready, Right Guard.”

  “Waiting with open arms, darling,” Stewart, the crabby Marine, said gruffly. “Just don’t trip over your shoelaces as you fall back, kid.”

  “Good work, Right Tackle,” Gnuko said, knowing it was true even though he had hoped not to lose any Lancers during the initial engagements. “Bend but don’t break; keep them in front of you and draw them into the ship.”

  A moment later, another alarm sounded in his HUD which indicated that the starboard airlock had been breached. “You’re up, Left Guard,” he said to the Tracto-an, “go easy on them. Let ‘em get a head of steam before we give them both barrels.”

  “I will obey,” Paulus replied tersely, clearly disliking the idea of not giving the enemy his everything at the outset. In truth, it was something Gnuko could relate to, but he knew better than most that not every contest was won in the opening exchange. Sometimes you have to give ground to get the angle on your enemy, and he had designed the Pride’s counter-boarding protocols with that principle in mind.

  “Contact,” Paulus reported before another round of crackling weapons fire filled the Defense Team Command channel. “Falling back to second position,” the Tracto-an reported after a somewhat lengthy exchange of fire, “four enemy have fallen to our fire, along with two Lancers.”

  “Seven to three,” Gnuko said, trying to keep his tone upbeat but silently cursing that they had taken three losses in the opening exchange, “I’ll take that ratio all day long. Be ready for them, JP; they’re coming your way.”

  “I was born ready,” the brash Promethean replied.

  “You were born bare-ass naked with your pathetic excuse for manhood sucked up so high inside your abdomen that they declared you were a girl,” Gnuko retorted. It was only half false: apparently there had, indeed, been a clerical error which had resulted in Jean-Pierre having been labeled female for nearly two weeks prior to anyone catching the mistake and correcting it. “Of course, with that high-pitched voice and silky-smooth skin, it’s no wonder they mistook you for the fairer sex.”

  “Haters gonna hate—” Jean-Pierre sighed just before gunfire erupted from Stewart’s vox.

  “Contact,” the curmudgeonly Marine reported after the fire had ceased, “two hostiles down, no friendlies. If you’re not distracted by all the woman-talk between the Center and Left Tackle,” he continued gruffly, “would you mind covering my team’s withdrawal, Right Tackle?”

  “In position now,” Britt acknowledged. “You’re good to go, Right Guard.”

  Gnuko’s HUD showed the five teams, including his, and their respective locations on a three dimensional map of the Pride’s interior. His people were taking a somewhat indirect route toward the bridge, and apparently the enemy Marines had noticed since the internal sensors showed motion along the main corridors to either side of the ship. Those corridors represented the more direct route to the bridge—but Gnuko had prepared surprises for the enemy the day before which would show them the error of refusing to dance to his Lancers’ tune.

  Waiting only as long as he needed to ensure maximum damage, Gnuko triggered the explosives he had set at the port corridor’s primary junction. She ship shook with the violence of the explosion—an explosion which had also been designed to expose that section to the vacuum of space—while internal sensors died in the immediate vicinity, but he was certain that the enemy Marines had been slain in the deadly trap.

  Technically, booby-trapping one’s own ship was illegal and against several military accords, but the Pride’s crew was more concerned with winning than they were with being the only side in the current conflict that would keep to the rules.

  Before the starboard team of enemy Marines could pull back—apparently having detected the presence of the explosives on their side, either directly or indirectly by witnessing their cohorts’ deaths—Gnuko triggered the explosion in the starboard junction. Where six enemy Marines had died in the first explosion on the port side, only two were likely to have been caught in the second blast, but those were two Marines his people wouldn’t have to exchange fire with.

  “Eight down to the first traps,” Gnuko said with satisfaction. “That makes the score fifteen for the MSP and three for the Rim Fleet. Heads up, Right Tackle and Center,” he said after confirming that the enemy teams were now moving toward his perfectly-positioned troops, “you’ve got incoming.” If the enemy attempted to cut through the bulkheads with their boarding axes, or vibro-blades, his people still had plenty of time to fall back to the last rally point.

  But the enemy Marines seemed more concerned with speed than with taking the most direct course, and before his vid pick-ups had all been destroyed by the enemy forces, Gnuko counted no fewer than sixty one Marines had boarded the Pride of Prometheus. Thankfully, the flow of enemy armor had slowed significantly prior to the last vid feed going dead, but that still meant that Gnuko’s people were outnumbered three-to-two—even after the highly successful opening exchanges and trap-springing.

  Some of the Pride’s internal sensors still functioned well enough for him to see that a splinter force had broken off from the starboard team and was heading his way. Gripping his rifle and doing a quick nose count of his six man team, he said, “We’ve got incoming, boys. Remember: give them a ten second pushback and then withdraw to the maintenance junction. We don’t want to be anywhere near here when this trap goes off,” he said, looking briefly to the door which led to Fei Long’s quarters, “but we’ll only have a thirty second window to come back and finish them, assuming their armor’s been hardened.”

  The young man had left a transceiver broadcasting a scrambling signal of some kind which he was convinced would get the Marines’ attention, and he had asked Sergeant Gnuko to deploy an ion bomb in the event the ship was engaged in a hostile boarding action.

  So Sergeant Gnuko readied the ion bomb’s trigger, which was linked to his HUD, and prepared to receive the enemy Marines. Soon enough, a pair of them emerged from the nearby intersection and Gnuko’s people opened fire, taking one of them in the visor and the other in the arm. The headshot was a kill, but the other Marine brought up his weapon—a heavy plasma cannon—and launched a superheated blast of blue fire down the corridor in their direction.

  The shot took the Lancer to Gnuko’s left squarely in the helmet, while the roaring inferno briefly engulfed Gnuko’s armor before dissipating as it continued down the corridor. He didn’t even need to look to see that the Lancer was dead; their armor’s visors were incapable of withstanding a direct plasma cannon hit. Gnuko sprayed his blaster rifle down the corridor as a trio of Marines move
d past their cannon-wielding fellow during the brief window his shot had created.

  Gnuko’s people joined him, and as one they sprayed energy bolts down the corridor. Shot after shot hammered into the enemy Marines, but the Left Tackle Team’s accuracy was compromised from the plasma bolt having momentarily put them off-balance. The result was a smattering of direct hits against the Marines’ most heavily-armored sections and, most importantly, no resulting kills.

  The seconds ticked by, and Gnuko knew they would need to withdraw two seconds ahead of schedule if they were to avoid a second round from the plasma cannon. “Pull back,” he barked when his HUD’s countdown reached eight seconds, two seconds short of his predetermined stand’s time. His people responded quickly, moving backward while covering each other with overlapping fire but the enemy Marines were emboldened and charged down the corridor. Only the occasional lucky shot from Gnuko’s people—including one sent by his own rifle—managed to slow the enemy advance to anything less than a full-out charge.

  Another of his Lancers fell to enemy fire, but he regained his feet and managed to drag himself to the nearest intersection—the intersection which led to the maintenance junction where he and his men would be shielded from the ion bomb.

  He unpinned a pair of plasma grenades from his belt and tossed them down the corridor, pleased to see them explode just as a pair of charging Marines came around the bend. The armored men were thrown from their feet—one of whom had been directly over the top of a grenade, which proved a fatal mistake as the groin of his armor was rent asunder by the white-blue plasma explosion.

  “Move, move, move,” Gnuko barked as his men four subordinates filed into the junction as quickly as they could squeeze their armored bulk into the cramped space. Once they were inside, he joined them and closed the door before purging the atmosphere via a manually-opened vent. The atmosphere was vented into the void outside the ship in a matter of seconds, after which Gnuko activated the ion bomb.

  A dull, barely audible thrum followed the sharp, cracking sound which reverberated through the bulkheads at the bomb’s explosion, and without further ado he led his men out of the junction after closing the emergency atmosphere vent. The rush of air from the corridor into the maintenance junction was more than a human could fight through without powered assistance, but he pushed through easily with the power-assisted joints of his armor to augment his already impressive strength.

  The corridor was dark, since the Pride’s internal power grid in the area had been shut down by the ion bomb. But Gnuko quickly sighted a Marine leaning against the wall, and the man raised his rifle but it misfired—a common occurrence following ionic interference like that which had been given off by the bomb.

  Without ceremony, and without breaking stride, Gnuko put a blaster bolt through the man’s visor and his body toppled ponderously before crashing to the deck. For good measure, a Lancer to Gnuko’s right put another bolt into the freshly-made hole, and the Lancers made their way to the bend in the corridor where Gnuko’s plasma grenades had cost a Marine his life.

  Moving past the smoldering pile of metal and meat which had previously been a Rim Fleet Marine, Gnuko peered around the corner of the corridor, knowing they had only ten more seconds before some of the enemy Marines’ systems began to come back online. He saw four Marines standing outside of the now-opened door to Fei Long’s quarters, and he unpinned a plasma grenade from his belt as he and his people fired blaster bolt after blaster bolt into the nearest Marine.

  With their foes unable to move at anything more than a snail’s pace, they made quick work of the Marines outside the room and Gnuko, without looking, tossed the plasma grenade into Fei Long’s room. Two of his Lancers did likewise, and the trio of explosions from within sent fire roaring out into the corridor while the bulkheads to either side of the door swelled and cracked with the barely-contained force of the grenades.

  Peeking inside, he saw a pair of Marines—or what remained of them, and their armor—had taken up positions to either side of the door. Just to be certain, he poured a couple of rounds into the head of the left Marine, while a member of his team did likewise for the one on the right.

  “Eight hostiles down,” Gnuko called over the Defense Team Command channel, “one friendly. This is where it gets interesting, boys.”

  “When you’re done playing with yourselves,” the grizzled Marine, Stewart, quipped amid streaming gunfire crackling through his vox, “the rest of us are at—and holding—the rally point.”

  Gnuko was briefly confused, uncertain how the enemy had reached the rally point so quickly. “On our way,” he said before switching to his local team channel. “Double time it to the rally point; let’s flank these bastards from the starboard side.”

  His team acknowledged the order, and within two minutes they had reached the corridor which the enemy Marines occupied as they poured fire into the Lancers holding the last defensible position outside the lift which led to the bridge.

  Using hand signals, Gnuko gestured for his people to use their remaining grenades—which totaled six: two plasma and four high explosive—as cover for a charge. He would lead the charge and, with any luck, they could close to melee range with the enemy and take over their position without compromising its defensive integrity any more than necessary.

  He remembered Lu Bu’s quick thinking which had seen her pile the grenades into a helmet before linking them to a single control. He did likewise, sans the helmet, by using the magnetic interlocks of the high explosive grenades to create a single ball of grenades. When he was finished, he set the grenades to a three second timer and hit the button before throwing the grenades like a bowling ball down the corridor and ducking behind the corner.

  The seconds counted down and there was a deck-shaking explosion, followed by Gnuko and his people rounding the corner and charging down the corridor. Blue flames licked away the last of the oxygen throughout the corridor as it almost lazily wandered away from the epicenter of the blast. Gnuko was disappointed to see that the explosion had only killed two Marines, but he and his people made it nearly two thirds of the way to the enemy position before the Marines sent anything resembling suppressing fire their way.

  A grenade arced through the air, and Gnuko’s reflexes weren’t good enough to pick it off with his blaster rifle before it went off. He knew instantly that it was an ion grenade, and he fought to keep his feet beneath him as a quartet of Marines charged down the corridor with their mono-locsium boarding axes drawn.

  Moving sluggishly, Gnuko was relieved to see that his blaster rifle somehow had remained functional as he fired a pair of shots down the corridor. One shot took a Marine in the knee joint, causing him to stagger as Gnuko’s men moved around him. Apparently his armor was the only one that had been deactivated by the ion blast, and no sooner had his men reached his position than the Marines laid into them with their boarding axes.

  Since this was a main corridor, it was wide enough for nearly two power-armored Lancers—or Marines—to fight side-by-side relatively unencumbered. Vibro-blades met boarding axes, and one of Gnuko’s Lancers went down in the opening exchange as his gorget was torn apart by an expertly executed chop. A Marine and Lancer grappled, crashing to the deck with the Lancer gaining top position and pressing his vibro-blade against the Marine’s throat as his weapon began to saw its way through the duralloy of the man’s protective casement.

  But a blaster bolt from ahead struck Gnuko’s Lancer in the gauntlet which held that vibro-blade, and the man roared in pain as his hand had improbably been reduced to a molten ruin. The bolt must have struck the vibro-blade’s power supply and, like a firecracker held in a child’s clenched fist, the resulting explosion had completely destroyed the gauntlet which had gripped it.

  The Marine took advantage of the moment by bashing his gauntlet into the Lancer’s visor over and over before rolling toward the ruined hand of the Lancer and ending up on top.

  Gnuko’s feet were moving sluggishly, but he manag
ed to get his blaster rifle trained on the Marine’s helmet just as the man brought his boarding axe up for the coup de grace on the crippled Lancer.

  Gnuko’s shot was far from precise, taking the Marine in the shoulder, but it gave his teammate enough time to grab a grenade from the Marine’s belt, activate it, and reach behind the Marine’s body with his lone remaining hand.

  Before he could let go of the explosive device—assuming he had ever intended to do so—the grenade exploded against the Marine’s back and his armor seized before going limp and crashing to the deck. A foot-wide hole had been torn in the Marine’s armor at the small of his back, and the wound was clearly fatal.

  The Lancer, on the other hand, had given up precisely that—both of his arms now ended in ruined, molten lumps of metal fused with charred flesh.

  Gnuko’s armor began its reboot cycle, which meant he had five seconds before it would regain functionality. Just then he saw a nearby Marine—the same one that had expertly killed one of Gnuko’s people via axe-to-the-gorget—turn his attention toward him.

  Gnuko barely had time to get his vibro-blade up in a defensive grip before the Marine was upon him.

  Chapter XVIII: Moving in the Pocket

  Middleton came to with a sharp, stinging sensation in the front of his skull. At first he thought that he had awoken to a blaster bolt being fired up his nose, then he saw the face of Hephaestion above him.

  The young Tracto-an held a quick-stim stick in his hand while the other was behind Middleton’s head, and a quick look told the Pride’s Captain that Hephaestion had administered nearly the entire contents of the device in one go—fully three times the recommended dosage.

  “Report,” he grimaced, sitting upright and testing his legs as he moved to stand.

  “The Light Cruiser intercepted us,” Hephaestion replied, “they sent a war party aboard, and they have nearly reached the bridge.”