Pearce needed to regain a tactical position quickly, and even as Garga raised both locked fists to land another blow Pearce let go of his waist and struck out with his left fist at Garga’s midsection while grabbing the belt on Garga’s left hip with his right hand. As Garga’s back was already against a hard surface, the blow pushed Pearce backwards and pivoted him around the incoming strike. Garga’s double arm strike ended up knocking Pearce’s left arm harmlessly down and away.
Pearce used the momentum imparted from Garga to put his body in a lateral spin as he pulled himself up by tugging hard on Garga’s belt with his right hand. This brought Pearce quickly around to face Garga again, now at equal height and with his right gloved fist using the centripetal motion of the spin to unload a vicious punch directly into the assassin’s helmet.
With Garga was still backed up against the bulkhead, the force unleashed was massive. As the punch collided with the transparent faceplate it rammed the helmet back against the bulkhead, transferring the majority of the blow directly into the polycarbonate glass. Pearce was rewarded with a spiderweb pattern of tiny cracks that appeared silently on the killer’s helm, but the glass held.
To Garga’s credit, he didn’t flinch or hesitate in the slightest at the impressive display of raw strength and agility that Pearce had demonstrated. Instead, even as Pearce brought his left arm around to try and strike another blow, Garga deftly blocked and countered with a grapple attempt on Pearce’s arm.
Pearce twisted away and traded a flurry of infective attacks and parries with Garga before the assassin finally managed to break free of Pearce’s two hands and land a glancing elbow-strike on one of Pearce’s shoulders that did no damage but caused his upper body to rotate away from Garga and left his lower body dangerously exposed.
Sensing his vulnerability, Pearce quickly scissored his legs free of Garga’s attempt to grab them and managed to weakly push off of his opponent’s stomach with his feet. This rotated his body back to face the assassin and sent him on a trajectory deeper into the corridor, but left him suspended in the middle of the tunnel for a handful of seconds as he floated towards the “ceiling”. Garga didn’t hesitate, pulling his combat knife and quickly launching himself after Pearce by pushing off from the bulkhead.
Hand-to-hand combat in zero gravity was an incredibly difficult art, as the normal forces of leverage that enabled striking didn’t exist for the most part. Punching someone in zero-g would simply send both combatants flying away from each other without the anchoring force of gravity. Fighting in zero atmosphere made it even more challenging, as any serious loss of suit integrity could effectively end the fight.
Pearce had spent the equivalent of months training in situations like this. Still, disarming an armed attacker also well-trained in “double zero” combat was incredibly difficult. Doing so while “on the float” was nearly impossible.
Garga flew towards Pearce like a superhero, right arm extended with the knife pointing directly at Pearce’s chest. The edge of a standard combat knife was carbyne-coated and nearly monomolecular in sharpness. It could easily cut through his suit and subcutaneous armor, and therefore was a major threat.
Pearce extended his arms vertically upwards in front of him, elbows bent at 90 degrees, and at the split second the assassin’s knife slipped between them he slammed both arms inward. His left hand slapped at the knife’s blade with an open palm while his right smashed into the wrist and grabbed tightly. This forced Garga’s hand back inward towards his own body and would have smacked the knife away against a lesser opponent, but Garga’s enhanced strength kept a grip on the blade, leaving the knife pointing at about a 15 degree angle towards Pearce’s right shoulder.
And then Garga was crashing into Pearce, sending both men flying back towards the center of the station. Pearce felt the pain as the blade tore through his suit and nicked his deltoid, heard the suit alarm increase in intensity as the slow leak from his tank became an open tear in his suit.
He ignored both. Keeping his right hand firmly gripped on Garga’s right wrist, he shot out his left hand with a blow directed at his opponents elbow, intending to use the compression of both arms to shatter the joint.
Garga countered, extending the right elbow to a sharp angle instead of a flat plane and causing Pearce’s blow to land with far less force, giving himself a good crack to the knuckles for the effort. Pearce felt new sharp pains as Garga twisted the blade against the skin of his shoulder, opening new superficial slices into the muscle.
The two combatants were nearly helmet to helmet when they crashed into the body of Sergeant Rogers, who had rebounded off of the “floor” and was floating lifelessly in the center of the tunnel. The impact banged their helmets together and gave Pearce enough leverage to push off the dead body and change their vector, rotating as he did so.
He hit the side of the tunnel next and let his body roll with the sudden introduction of friction, such that Garga was pivoted around and now in front of their continued path towards the center of the station. The motion removed the knife from his arm and Pearce, anticipating the retraction, further bent the arm away from his body so that he wasn’t in imminent harm of being stabbed again.
They sailed past Jula, whom was so intent on her work that she hadn’t even noticed the carnage and fighting around her for last ten seconds. That changed as Pearce saw Rogers’ body, flung across the tunnel by their impact, slam into her from behind out of the corner of his eye in between trading blows with Garga. And then she was out of his sight.
The two battled down the length of the hallway, centered on control of the hand that held the knife. They were spinning as they went, all sense of up and down completely lost, trading dozens of attacks. Strikes were nearly ineffective, and neither combatant could get the positioning to put an effective grappling maneuver together while fighting over the knife. His VIA assisted where possible, highlighting vulnerabilities, overlaying predictions and threat vectors, and projecting suggested attacks, but he was mostly fighting on pure instinct. Pearce needed to get control of this fight quickly before he made a fatal mistake against this skilled combatant.
Over Garga’s shoulder Pearce saw the approaching intersection of the station. At the angle they were travelling, they would impact the far corner of where this level met the vertical shaft in a few seconds. Sensing an opportunity, Pearce gave up trying to protect himself from Garga’s free hand and grabbed at the knife hand with both of his own instead. Garga pounced on the opening and lashed out in an attempt to disconnect Pearce’s helmet while Pearce used all of his strength to try and gain control of the knife.
Finally, after wrenching on the knife hand several times Pearce let go completely, and Garga was caught off guard momentarily as his counter met no resistance, jerking the blade towards his own body. This was a risky gamble, and if he failed to follow up successfully Garga would be left in full control of the weapon once again.
Then they impacted the corner of the shaft and Pearce’s body crashed into the assassin’s once again, pushing the knife backwards even further, the tip of the blade pointed now at Garga’s chest. Pearce wasted no time, feinting with his left hand towards the knife and then grabbing the assassin’s suit for leverage and throwing a full force punch with his right. The punch connected with Garga’s hand and smashed it and the knife it held directly into his left breast and the heart underneath it, buried to the hilt.
Pearce’s suit lamp illuminated Garga’s aghast face as his eyes bulged and he cried out silently in pain and agony. Pearce kept his grip on the dying assassin, twisting the knife in place as his body was wracked with spasms and the throes of death. He coughed up blood several times, splattering the inside of his helmet and filling it with floating red globules that obscured his face during his final moments. And then it was over.
Pearce let go of the knife and pushed off of Garga’s still frame. He grabbed onto the nearest handhold, turning to take in the scene of death behind him. The tunnel was in chaos. Rogers�
�� and Benzinger’s bodies were both slowly spinning, their suit lamp beams creating windmills of light. Copious amounts of blood floated throughout the space in semi-crystalized blobs, having boiled and then frozen in the vacuum of the station.
He was surprised to see that Jula had retrieved Garga’s sidearm and was aiming it in Pearce and Garga’s direction. He waved at her to lower the weapon and she simply tossed it to the side, a look of horror fixated upon her face. Pearce’s lamp revealed that her white and yellow environment suit was absolutely bathed in blood, and crystalized globules surrounded her reflecting the beam like a swarm of fireflies.
He floated himself back towards her and anchored to another nearby handhold, reaching out to grab her hand and pull her in close. She was crying in her helmet, silent to him. Pearce could see the tears building up into a large blobs in her eyes. He pulled her close, one arm around her waist, and gently rested his helmet against her own.
“It’s OK now! He’s dead!” Pearce shouted loudly. The vibrations from the helmet-to-helmet contact would let Jula hear his voice, albeit severely muffled. He saw her hear him, take a deep breath, and nod back in response.
“You need to stop crying, tears don’t flow in zero gravity and you’ll just fill your eyes up with water. I need to stop the jamming and see if the others are alright! I’ll be right back!”
He retrieved the pistol that Jula had released and headed towards to Garga’s body. He might be dead, but the power supply for his VIA was still functional and therefore it was still operational, still jamming the comm frequencies, and still attempting at this very moment to overwhelm Pierce’s cyberwarfare suite. He had to shut down the VIA completely.
The Marine’s standard sidearm was an Arbiter Arms M-97 Particle Beam pistol. It fired a burst of charged high energy particles at near relativistic speeds in a narrow beam, highly effective at short range but rapidly dropping in efficiency at longer distances as the conical shape of the blast expanded. This made it ideal for intra-ship operations as it reduced the risk of over-penetration leading to catastrophic hull integrity loss and rapid depressurization. At the range of only a half meter it would turn the inside of a human head into a soupy mess.
As Pearce headed back towards the dead assassin, he mulled over the events that had just occurred. Pearce was an elite former SSG soldier with few peers in the Confed military, and had only been enhanced further during his time with Omega. And still this assassin had deftly countered nearly his every move, fighting back with equal skill and strength. Who the hell was he?
Pearce remembered that Garga had not been originally assigned to this team, and it was only due to the original Private falling ill that he had been slotted in as a replacement. He must have manipulated the situation to ensure he would be included on the voyage. What exactly was so damning on the gravimetrics that he would kill them all to hide it?
Pearce caught up with Garga’s body, which was still floating near the center shaft. He hauled him over and wedged him against one of the handholds, ensuring there were no vital systems directly behind him. He aimed at the dead man’s skull and fired a barrage of blasts that obliterated the entire upper half of his head. One of the shots in the fusillade destroyed the BCI implant that was the VIA and the jamming was suddenly gone, the squad’s communication lines springing back to life with a cacophony of voices yelling.
Corporal Murrig was one, demanding a sitrep. Meson was another, asking in a panicked voice what the hell was going on.
The third was Captain Lillywhite of the Nightingale, declaring an emergency.
NINE
New Shanghai L2 Lagrange Point, Shenzen System
L2 PAN Station
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” the Captain’s voice repeated over the comm with urgency. “Nightingale to boarding party, please respond.”
“Break Zero,” Pearce announced, calling for everyone to cease transmitting. “Captain, this is Buxton, go ahead.” Pearce saw no point in informing anyone about his own already-solved emergency until he knew what was still ongoing aboard the Nightingale.
“We’ve been trying to reach you!” the Captain exclaimed. “We’ve suffered a massive cyberattack to core systems. The power core containment systems are going critical! My engineer can’t regain access to stabilize them, and we’ve lost long range comms.”
“Standby Nightingale,” Pearce responded as he unleashed his own cyberwarfare attack on the civilian passenger liner. The Nightingale’s security systems were rudimentary compared to the milspec systems it was designed to dominate. He smashed through firewalls and gained root access to the ship’s main systems in less than a second. It took another second for his cyberwarfare AI to evaluate what Garga’s own attack had done.
Garga had attacked the main short range communications controller with an energy overload, slagging the circuits entirely. He had done the same to the long-range QCOM system. Every interior door on the ship had been locked, and localized power surges had shorted out the electronic locking and control systems. The ship’s bridge controls had also been disabled, but thankfully they had plenty of redundant backups and Pearce was able to make them available again. Finally, all of the alarms and tripwires that monitored the main power core had been suppressed.
Pearce was hardly an engineer but knew enough about gravity wave reactors to understand that if the containment field failed for even a tiny fraction of a second that the ship, this station, and anything in the neighborhood was going to have a very bad day. The core itself and all related control systems were physically isolated from the main Nightingale network as a standard security measure, so Garga must have physically accessed and tampered with the core before they entered the station at some point.
“Captain Lillywhite, I’ve neutralized the cyber-attack and restored your primary ship controls, but I can’t remotely restore comms or help get the doors open. How long will it take your engineer to reach the Engine Room if they have to manually disengage the locking systems?”
The Captain’s response was immediate. “Almost five minutes. There are five bulkheads between the Bridge and the Engine Room and it takes at least a minute to manually crank each door wide enough to pass through…they are through the first one already and working on the second now.”
Pearce considered the layout of the ship from his memory. He had spent several days travelling to this system had explored every inch of her in the first few hours. He made a split second decision.
“Rivis, pull everything you need from that terminal,” he said on a private channel while pointing at her where she still stood slack jawed. He didn’t wait to see how she would respond before he grabbed a handhold on the central corridor and flung himself upwards with a precise motion that sent him hurtling with great speed.
“I know you are in shock but we need to find out what was so damned important that it was worth killing all of us to protect. You can do this.”
As he reached the main tunnel that led back to the Nightingale, he deftly hooked another handhold and altered his trajectory such that he pivoted straight down the tunnel towards the docking umbilical. He rejoined the public channel.
“Captain, I’m inbound back to the Nightingale. There are only 2 doors between the airlock and the reactor. I’ll make it there first and your Engineer can talk me through what needs to be done until he arrives. Corporal Murrig, leave Private Allison there and rendezvous with Rivis at the gravimetrics cluster, stat.” He took a breath as he approached the narrow hatch leading out of the station.
“Garga was an enemy agent. He killed Rogers and Benzinger and sabotaged the Nightingale. I’ve neutralized him and the cyber-threat. Once we get the reactor under control we can have a full SITREP,” he said while grunting a bit as he used the umbilical’s handholds to slow down and reverse his body position so that his feet pointed “down” at the Nightingale’s inner airlock door.
The Corporal was obviously taken off guard and tried to ask for further clarification, but Pearce didn’t have time
to deal with it and cut him off just before he reached the open outer airlock door. “Corporal, that’s an order. Now move it!”
Pearce “landed” on the inner airlock door with considerable speed despite slowing himself down a bit. He absorbed the impact with his knees and then pushed off with both feet while arching backwards, a maneuver that would have been a backflip in a gravity well, but allowed him to grab onto the “ceiling” handholds of the airlock and then push himself down to the “floor”. He had triggered the emergency airlock cycle as soon as he had cleared the outer doorway with his VIA and by the time his feet gently touched the “floor”, the outer door was closed.
It took a few more seconds for the hissing of returning air to become audible as pressure steadily increased in the airlock. The emergency cycle dumped the maximum amount of air possible into the airlock versus the more restrained standard procedure which could take a minute or more.
While Pearce waited for full pressurization, he quickly took off his suit gloves and began unstrapping the main torso, ignoring the urgent alarms that his suit began screaming at him. The sudden depressurization felt a little cold and strange, but the airlock cycle was nearly 75% complete and there was no risk.
As the completion number swept past 90% he released the clasps that locked his helmet into place and quickly unscrewed it the quarter turn required to clear the threading that connected it to the torso. With a quick rush of air the helmet popped right off of his head, and he shucked the suit torso afterwards right over his head.
The airlock indicator turned green as the cycle completed, and the inner airlock door slid open automatically. Luckily, the door locking controls that Garga had fried were on a separate circuit from the airlock. As the doors opened, Pearce grabbed the waist of his lower suit and pushed his legs out in a single smooth motion. He was left wearing his skintight thermal undersuit, a grey and blue unitard that covered everything except his face and was adorned with a few embedded conduits that assisted with temperature control while in vacuum.
Impact Event (Dargo Pearce Chronicles #1) Page 12
