by Rick Partlow
“Gunny, move them out!” she ordered.
“First squad, advance by teams!” Sandell snapped. “Second, cover them! Third, set up rear security!”
“You guys good to go, Whiskey Foxtrot One, over?” the lander’s pilot asked.
She glanced around and saw the sleek craft spiraling around the edge of the valley, a wavy heat mirage of engine exhaust at its tail.
“Roger Niner Niner,” she answered. “Thanks for the assist. Out.”
Brandt scrambled to her feet and stepped to the edge of the loader, leaning out to watch First Squad as they bounded forward, Alpha Team covering Bravo as the four Marines in that team left cover to spread across the smoldering entranceway. No enemy fire answered their movement, and Brandt could see through the point man’s helmet cam that the enemy troops had been reduced to scattered and charred body parts, barely identifiable as separate from the wreckage of the rovers. The walls of the entranceway were centimeters-thick metal, but they’d been scorched and scarred by the missile warheads, and smoke still drifted through the broad corridor into the facility.
As the teams moved further into the building, Brandt and her platoon sergeant followed, leaving a squad watching the rear. Brandt felt a strange tingling up her back as she passed beneath the cyclopean bulk of the entrance, a sense of foreboding that she had to work to shake off. This smelled entirely like a trap. She kept her head on a swivel, watching all around her and cycling through the visual feeds from the point man and the Marines out to the flanks until she felt dizzy.
A few disassembled pieces of machinery lined the walls, surrounded by disused tools; and the sealed, metal mass of the methane separators worked tirelessly with a hum Brandt could feel through the floor. But what drew her eye was something that seemed added-on and out of place, jury-rigged on the factory floor and fed by a tangle of bypassed electrical lines from the plant’s generator. It was a mismatch of spherical tanks, processing banks and magnetic field generators that didn’t look like anything she’d seen before. She couldn’t tell what it made, but it was surrounded by a series of large cylinders held fast in metal racks.
“Triton,” Brandt broadcast, “you seeing this?”
“Roger, Lieutenant,” Captain Pirelli acknowledged. “Secure that machinery until a tech team can take a look at it.”
“Aye ma’am,” Brandt said, “we’ll put a squad on it as soon as we get this building secure. Brandt out.” She switched to Sgt. Sandell’s channel. “Gunny, detail two Marines from Second Squad to pull guard on this thing while we secure the rest of the facility.”
“Aye, ma’am,” Sandell grunted assent.
He and Brandt waited until the two troops came forward and posted themselves in covered positions near the machinery before they resumed the platoon’s movement deeper into the building. A support wall cut off the generator and separation machinery from the facility’s habitation module, with a small airlock set into that wall. No enemy were in sight as they spread out in a perimeter that arced out from the airlock and waited for Brandt and Sandell to examine the controls.
Brandt pulled a hand-held scanner from a chest pouch and held it up to the door, watching the chemical analysis settle into a final reading.
“No explosives detected,” she told her platoon sergeant. “Get Booth up here and get it open…”
She hadn’t finished the sentence when the indicator light above the door went yellow. Someone had opened the inner airlock door.
Without a word, the lead squad moved to cover behind heavy machinery and bulk storage tubs; Brandt joined Sandell in a crouch behind a pallet of spare turbine blades, their weapons held at the ready, stocks pulled into their shoulders and optics linked to their helmets. It was less than a minute before the outer door opened…and no one stepped through.
Instead, an alarm sounded and the yellow warning light began to flash red as the inner lock remained open and the breathable air within the habitation area began rushing out into the thinner methane mix of the moon’s atmosphere with a roar that Brandt could hear on her external audio pickups. Something teased at the back of Brandt’s mind but she couldn’t pin it down.
“What the fuck are they doing?” the Lieutenant wondered to the Gunny. “Why would they flush the habitation section?”
“Stay ready,” Sandell cautioned on the platoon net. “They ain’t opening the door to make us feel more welcome.” He chuckled softly on the command net. “Maybe we oughta’ let the owners bill them for wasting oxygen, ma’am.”
Wait…that was it. Oxygen!
There was no time to go through the Gunny. She switched to the platoon net as she rose from her crouch, waving with one hand. “Everyone out of the building!” she shouted, a surge of panic running through her as she realized what was happening. “Get out now! Run!”
Oxygen from the crew quarters, she thought as she watched the two squads break into a trot that to her seemed painfully slow.
Methane in the atmosphere that filled the main floor of the facility.
And any spark…
Brandt heard a faint pop and thought she saw a flicker like far-off lightning…and then brightness swallowed her up for just a half-second before the lights went out forever.
“Colonel Stark,” Shannon heard over her helmet headphones. A glance at her HUD told her that the transmission was from the Triton, but she had already recognized Captain Pirelli’s voice.
“Yes, Captain?” she responded quietly, her attention focused ahead of her, where the rest of the insertion team was working on clearing the freighter’s crew quarters.
“There’s been an explosion at the separation plant.” A video popped up in a corner of her HUD, showing a huge fireball engulfing the ugly structure, clouds of smoke billowing outward in shapes curiously unlike those you would see in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. “This shot is from the lander. We lost all contact with the Marine platoon shortly after they found this.” Another shot, this one of a sophisticated looking piece of machinery parasited into the power supply of the separation plant.
“Damn,” Shannon hissed. Lt. Brandt was a good officer. “Keep the lander on close patrol and if they see any of them alive, get them evacuated. Otherwise, tell them to stay in the air. When we’re done up here, my ops team will go down with the investigation unit and check it out.”
“Copy that, Colonel.” Pirelli’s transmission ended and Shannon devoted her full attention to the feed from the point man.
The first two crew cabins were empty, but they had obviously been converted to storage facilities for biomechs. Rest benches lined the walls, fitted with straps to hold the things down, and feeding and waste disposal tubes dangled obscenely. The sight of the fixtures sent an involuntary shiver through her. It wasn’t the implacability of the things that freaked her out, it was the fact that they were just too damn close to human and yet so obviously not. She hoped they had all been down on the surface.
The point man moved past the biomech storage to the next to last of the crew quarters and took up a position just to the side of it while the next operator in line reached over and hit the control to open the door. A red light flashed on the exterior panel: the door was locked.
“Check the last of the quarters,” Bocanegra ordered. “Clear it then come back to that one.”
The entry team acknowledged then repeated the process for the last room. It was unlocked and unoccupied, so they moved back to the locked door. One of the team pulled out a computer module and affixed it to the control panel, where it began working on cracking the lock code.
“Colonel Stark!” Shannon noted the urgency in Rescorla’s voice on her helmet pickup. “The remaining cargo shuttle is powering up!”
“Roger that,” Shannon responded, then turned and hit her backpack thrusters, heading back for the freighter’s hold. “Sgt. Bocanegra, with me! Get the outside crew to that shuttle berth now!”
Shannon knew that Bocanegra had to be restraining himself from screaming at her, but she didn’t care:
there was too much at stake. She ignored the stomach-twisting sensation of the ship’s bulkheads zipping by her on either side and concentrated on the one that was approaching head-on: the opposite side of the cargo hold. At the last possible second, she turned 180 degrees and opened the throttle on her suit’s thrusters, feeling herself pushed painfully into her maneuvering unit as she decelerated. She felt a gentle “clunk” through her suit as she still collided with the far bulkhead at a fraction of her previous speed, but then she was accelerating again, this time across the bay and toward the shuttle docking port.
Smoke still drifted fitfully across the bay from the gunfight of only a few minutes ago, but she could clearly see the docking port control panel, with its blinking red light that indicated that it was cycled and locked. Shannon didn’t hesitate. Her load-out, like that of all the others in the team, included a shaped breaching charge and she yanked it out of its chest pouch even as she used the maneuvering pack to decelerate once again, stopping just centimeters from the docking port.
Shannon had never used one of the charges in actual combat, but she and McKay both attended an annual two week refresher course in field operations just like every other Intelligence officer. Her hands moved almost automatically, stripping the backing off the squared, doughy mass and sticking the adhesive against the lock. She punched a ten second delay into the timer and was about to hit the button to start it when another charge was slapped up against the lock next to hers.
Startled, she turned and saw Sgt. Bocanegra beside her, also programming ten seconds onto his timer. “Ready?” he asked her, his finger hovering over the button to start the countdown.
“Now,” she instructed and they both hit the controls at once, then jetted away from the port and back behind the cover of the sole cargo container.
They’d barely settled in place before the charges detonated, silent in the vacuum but for a vibration that Shannon could feel where her foot touched the deck. A puff of atmosphere from the pressurized shuttle hissed into the bay and was lost. A few stray fragments ricocheted soundlessly, but most of the blast had been targeted inward and as Shannon emerged from behind the cylindrical container, she could see that the docking port was a twisted ruin. A gaping hole ringed with torn metal framed smoking, sparking wreckage inside the cargo shuttle and Shannon could see the bare metal of the hull opposite the hole where insulation, padding and retaining harnesses had been blown away.
Before Bocanegra could object, Shannon jetted toward the hole, taking the time to transmit, “Colonel Stark and Sgt. Bocanegra boarding the craft from inside!” to the outside security team. Wouldn’t do to catch friendly fire from one of those lasers right through the shuttle’s hull.
Shannon squeezed all her tactical consideration into the second and a half it took her to reach the port; there weren’t too many choices. She worked the maneuver control with her left hand, turning herself parallel to the body of the shuttle, facing the cockpit, then she raised her rifle and gritted her teeth, bracing for the impact.
The armored suit was padded on the inside, but she still felt the breath gush out of her lungs when her shoulder slammed into the far bulkhead of the shuttle’s cargo compartment, still saw star floating across her vision. She managed to retain her hold on her rifle, and through the blinking floaters in her eyes she could see a figure in a vacc suit just letting go of a tenuous hold on the back of the pilot’s couch, one hand fumbling with a handgun.
Shannon aimed as best she could as she drifted away from the bulkhead, on the rebound from her collision, and squeezed off a short burst. She was trying to shoot to wound, hoping to take the man alive, but it was a good twenty meters down the length of the cargo bay to the cockpit and she was moving. The three tungsten penetrators punched through the spacesuited enemy’s chest, the momentum from the hits sending him floating back towards the viewscreen in a cloud of red globules. The handgun slipped from slack fingers and flipped away to rotate slowly into the cockpit.
Shannon felt her momentum arrested as the gun-backpack link triggered her maneuvering jets to counter the recoil, and she let go of her rifle with her left hand, grasping the maneuvering control. She jetted over to the floating body, grabbing at his arm, then pushing up the polarized face shield on the helmet. His face was young-looking: unlined, untanned, unweathered. He could have been older if he were a planetbound urbanite; but if he was a spacer, he was a young one. And a dead one. His skin was the pale white of a man who had bled out past all medical help and liters of his life were drifting through the cockpit in thousands of minute crimson spheres that collided and merged and parted in a surreal sanguinary ballet.
“Gomer is down,” she broadcast, pushing him away from the control panel.
She knew Bocanegra was coming up behind her, but she ignored him: her full attention was devoted to the readings she could see on the cockpit engineering panel.
“Sergeant Bocanegra,” she said calmly but firmly, “evacuate this ship immediately.”
“All personnel, all personnel,” Bocanegra blared over the command channel. “Back to the shuttle ASAP! Shuttle, prepare for immediate burn back to the Triton!” After getting acknowledgment, he switched back to Colonel Stark’s private channel and asked her, “What is it, ma’am?”
Shannon chewed her lip as she jabbed at the engineering station’s touch screen, but it was dead, as were the rest of the controls. The readouts gave her the story, but she was helpless to change the story they told.
“He set the shuttle’s reactor to overload,” she told the NCO. “It’ll take the freighter with it.” She waved at the readout. ”We have a bit over seven minutes and I can’t shut it down.”
“Son of a bitch,” Bocanegra muttered.
“Colonel Stark,” Shannon heard Lauria, one of the team’s junior NCO’s, transmit, “we have a prisoner. He was holed up in one of the crew compartments.”
“Get him back to our shuttle,” Stark instructed, using her maneuvering unit to move back to the ruined docking port. “Sgt. Bocanegra and I will be there momentarily. The freighter’s been set to self-destruct; we have about five minutes to get out of here.”
Shannon tried to move with precision and efficiency without giving in to the panic that threatened to well up inside her. She reminded herself that this wasn’t even close to the worst situation she’d ever faced, then had to remind herself in counterpoint that she could still die if she didn’t get off that damn ship. She tried to imagine how Jason would react if Captain Pirelli returned with the news that she’d been killed playing soldier on a booby-trapped ship; the thought felt like a kick in the stomach and she squeezed a bit more thrust from her backpack.
Then she was at the airlock and open space was yawning before her in all of its beauty and promise of comparative safety---ironic when she thought of how intimidating and forbidding it had seemed only a few minutes before. Ahead of her, she could see the entry team almost to the shuttle, holding between them a figure in a dull grey vacc suit, hands secured by thick, plastic zip ties.
“Security team is about ten seconds behind us,” Bocanegra informed her. “You head for the shuttle and I’ll wait here for them.”
“Oh, I think I can spare the ten seconds, Sergeant,” Shannon told him, grinning at his attempt to keep her safe.
“Ma’am,” Bocanegra growled, his patience obviously tested past its limits, “you do know you’re not expendable, right?”
“Sergeant,” Shannon informed him calmly, “I made up my mind almost ten years ago that I wasn’t going to lead from the rear ever again. If you can’t deal with that, I think you’re in the wrong outfit.”
“Understood, ma’am,” the NCO grumbled. Shannon thought he might say more, but the entry team chose that moment to pass them by, heading for the shuttle, so instead he reported: “All personnel accounted for, Colonel.”
“Then let’s get going,” she said, feeling a rush of relief that she worked hard to keep out of her voice. As they jetted back towards the utility
shuttle, a thought struck her and she keyed her radio. “Triton,” she broadcast, “this is Stark.”
“This is Pirelli,” the reply came. “I heard the freighter’s going to blow, ma’am,” Pirelli continued. “Are you and your people clear?”
“Yes we are, Captain,” Shannon told her, “but I had a thought. The attached cargo shuttle is what’s set to blow. I want you to target the docking collar with the ship’s laser and see if we can cut it loose and save that freighter.”
“Copy that, Colonel,” Pirelli acknowledged.
Shannon decelerated as the utility shuttle’s airlock loomed larger, the craft’s dull grey skin shining slightly in the reflection of the system’s primary, and then she was drifting slowly into the hold. Hands steadied her and stripped off her maneuvering unit as the airlock hatch slowly slid closed.
“Keep the prisoner in the cargo hold,” she instructed Bocanegra, who was floating next to her. “Once he’s scanned thoroughly, I want him isolated in here. Pump the atmosphere back up and tell him to strip his suit off, then we’re going to hold him in quarantine for at least 72 hours.” She switched frequencies to the shuttle’s pilot. “Rescorla, get us away from that freighter…I want a bit more room in case its fuel stores go up.”
“Roger that, ma’am,” the officer said. “Everybody hold onto something back there.”
Shannon reached back and grabbed a cargo strap, seeing Bocanegra check the others to make sure they did the same. Then a gentle pressure pushed them back towards the rear of the shuttle as the aerospacecraft’s drives took them further away from the enemy ship. Shannon switched her helmet’s video feed over to the bridge of the Triton and saw the representation of the freighter on the cutter’s Tactical screen with a targeting reticle hovering over the docking collar that held the cargo shuttle to the larger ship like a remora on an awkward, bulky shark.
