Chapter 6
A band along the wall told the two units which way to go and Bri remembered their first day on base, the band that guided them to their dormitories. But there wasn’t time for memories. The Helios was closing with the frigate.
Crewmen ran past them going the opposite direction, their faces stern, the eyes filled with a calm fear, like they knew that the next few minutes were all they were going to get. Alarms sounded and the ship vibrated, like something was being turned on or opened. Bri wondered what it would be like to serve on a ship, an immense fighting ship.
They turned a corner and faced a long, narrow hall. Small oval doors were cut into both sides, flush with the walls. 37 took one side and 62 the other. Bri’s overlay showed which pod was hers by illuminating the door with a green mark. She touched the controls and the shifted inward a few inches and then slid away revealing four small, high-back seats inside a pod-like space.
Her stomach flipped and she tasted bile. The air inside the boat was hot and sticky. She stepped inside, touched the harness across her chest armor and unlatched her rifled and packs. All the gear went in one seat as Kat climbed in behind her and did the same thing.
Cooper wrinkled his nose as he ducked and twisted to get through the narrow entry. “Ugh,” he waved a hand in front of his nose, “Gross.”
Kat chuckled and pulled the lifeboat’s harness over her shoulders. Bri watched and wondered how the harness was supposed to help if something went wrong? Was it there just to make the passenger, already trying to escape instant death inside of some galactic transit, a little more comfortable? A little more secure?
No one had any idea when the lifeboats would fire, all of the navigation and metrics were controlled by the officers at the conn which meant Andrews and there was some comfort in that, a sad comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. It meant he would die trying to keep them alive; he had been like a father to them.
“Thirty-six against sixteen hundred?” Kat looked out the little view-port even though she could only see the reflection of the inside of the boat. Cooper waved when he saw her staring at his reflection.
“Earther frigates are primarily first strike vehicles, but with the new slip technologies, they’re showing up all over NewT space.” Pauly’s voice came over U37’s connection.
“How many is that a piece?” Biloxi’s asked.
“44.44,” Pauly said.
“Enough chatter,” Arles barked the order. “I’ve just been informed that we lost the coin toss. We’re alpha. Our objective is to get into the facility and rescue as many as we can. We’ve got half the assemblage fleet on the way. We’ve just got to clear a path.”
Bri smiled when she heard Arles’ voice. She was glad she was lead, nothing ever shook her. There had never been a meeting, nothing formal anyway. The group had just sort of elected her as lead and Anderson had sort of gone with it. And it worked surprisingly well. Arles had a nice way of both relying on the team and working with the team. She must have gotten it from Andrews.
Striking unit. The words rattled Bri a bit. The team had spent hours and hours watching feeds of training missions and battle recon. In scrimmages, Anderson had put them against various scenarios that tested and utilized each person’s strength. They had drilled and run maneuvers through a hundred different scenarios, but no one really knew what it was like to face a marine. You would have thought they were afraid. Instead, there were confident, not comfortable, still afraid, but they felt prepared.
They had learned from Andrews. The way he worked them day after day, running games against no less than two exo’d units a day toward the end. It might not have been a horde of Earther marines, but it was the next best thing.
“Standby,” Arles sounded serious, and Bri figured she was being briefed by Andrews on a private com. “We’re two minutes from…”
The Helios shook. The alarms that had been a steady beat like a strange war drum, turned into panic. “Battle stations, battle stations.” Andrews’s voice came over the ship’s comm. The gravity generators failed. Everyone in the lifeboat, despite being strapped into the harnesses, shifted, suddenly weightless.
Bri took a deep breath. They had only done a few hours of training weightless and Bri didn’t like it. The generators came back on line and they felt their asses in the seats again.
Bri looked over at Kat and found the same awkward fear in her eyes.
“Fire, fire, fire!” Arles shouted across the open channel of the comm. A series of loud reports moved down the starboard side of the Helios - crack, crack, crack. Every launch shook the pod and grew louder and closer to the boat Bri and Kat and Cooper were crammed in.
“Hang on,” Kat’s knuckles lightened as she gripped the shoulder straps of her harness.
The explosion fired behind their boat and, in the space between two seconds, they were out in the void. The view screens showed the Helios falling away behind them. A large gash ran along the hull, a fiery scar of orange and red along the black skin.
Bri couldn’t blink. Lifeboats like her own moved away from the Helios in a wave, a handful of rocks thrown into the emptiness of space. The Helios, growing smaller and smaller as they moved toward Kilter Field, fired its main battery and two brilliant streaks of red flew across her view.
The plasma cannons were even more beautiful than they looked in the feeds. The twisting, brilliant light etched across the black like a striking snake.
Every watched but you couldn’t see the Earther frigate. There was no way to know if Andrews had hit her.
“They’re turning,” Kat’s voice was anxious, filled with worry.
The Helios’ drive engines lit the bow and she seemed to turn hard and fast. There was a chance she could get away, out of range of whatever the frigate was capable of. And it couldn’t give chase, it was attacking the facility. “You can do it, get away, run!” Bri heard her own voice in the silence.
“Turn! Go!” Kat shouted. “Go!”
A deep red bolt of light slammed into the starboard side. An angry orange ball of flame blossomed along the bow. The cobalt blue light of the ship’s engines slowly faded. The explosion faded and a flurry of debris hovered around the Helios. The lights faded and the ship went dark.
Everyone in the pod was quiet. No one could look away from the viewport.
Another shot struck the Helios along the prow. Without power, the force flipped her onto her back. “No,” Kat whispered, “No, no, no.”
The Helios was cut wide open. An angry red line smoldered down the side of the frigate as she spun uncontrollably. Bri tried not to think about all of the people. She closed her eyes and tried not to cry as the faces flashed through her thoughts.
“Maybe they got away,” Cooper said.
“Maybe,” Kat reached down and wrapped her hands around her rifle, “either way, they gave us a chance.”
The walls of the ship shook and they could hear the pod adjusting their flight path with little thruster blasts. The view screen became an angry blur of yellow, red, and orange as they burned through the atmosphere like a meteorite.
Bri took a deep breath and bit back the tears. Maybe Cooper was right, maybe they somehow got to lifeboats.
Gravity slowly took hold and Bri suddenly understood the need for the harness. She hooked her fingers around the straps near her shoulders and took a couple deep breaths as the pod bounced and pitched and twisted through the inferno. They were almost there.
“Buck up girl,” Kat reached over and punched her shoulder. “This is what he trained us to do.” She grinned.
The atmospheric color distortions faded and they were free falling. The skies over Kilter Field were clear and blue. Turbo chutes triggered and the force yanked them back against the harnesses. Bri felt every muscle in her body tighten and her stomach flipped more than once. Cooper vomited onto the floor’s grating and the smell of the air changed to something sour.
Looking at the viewport they could see two other lifeboats fa
lling toward the planet, chutes rippling in the wind.
The earth below them was a field of smoke and dust as if someone had simply set the entire planet on fire. They could see the top of the processing facility, the higher floors that rose above the clouds of smoke and dust. Bri touched the holograph and the view changed to x-ray.
“What?!” Cooper’s voice cracked and his eyes went wide.
“Crates,” Kat sighed.
She was right; the earth below them was a field of crates, there had to be fifty or sixty of them buried in the earth, their doors already open, the marines rushing toward the facility, massive gray suits emblazoned with blue.
“Waypoints have been identified and patched into your processors. Power your shields through the first power cell. Use your second cell to get to waypoint bravo.” Arles voice was calm and even.
Shields. Bri saw the setting on her lens and suddenly wished they had had more time with the equipment.
“The suits shields won’t last long, a few seconds at most. Get to cover as fast you can once the boats open.” Pauly’s voice came over the comm. “Spearhead. Spring. Like a cat.”
“Systems check,” Arles came back across the comm, “we’re ten seconds out. Weapons ready.”
Bri watched the diagnostic flash across her lens. All systems turned green.
Kat reached into a crate in the center of the lifeboat and started handing out power cells. “Lock and load, kids.”
Bri pulled her pistols. The cool metal pressed into the palm of her hand. She liked the feel of them, the way they fit, it was reassuring. The overlay ran a quick weapons check and flashed green. She counted each breath. The door will open. When it does, I’m the first one out.
The viewport went blank. The thrusters fired. The ear pieces automatically adjusted for the sound of the pod breaking, but the vibration shook them to their bone.
Shield. Then move.
The craft clunked to the ground. The harnesses vanished in a blink and Bri hit the door release.
The smell of wet earth and scorched metal rushed into the lifeboat. Bri could barely see ten feet past the lifeboat’s doorway. Tracer rounds slashed through the air around them. Bri’s overlay flashed red and a round whistled by her ear.
The shield activated. She held her breath and jumped out of the pod. The ground she landed on was hard-packed. She could taste the dust and smoke. A sensor tested the air quality and a visor closed over her face.
In a blink her entire view was an overlay.
“37, move!” Alers came over the comm. The last of the lifeboats thundered the ground around them, thrusters crackling.
Bri’s visor switched to infrared and she could make out lines of soldiers ahead of her. Her heart jumped.
For weeks they had been studying Earther marines, watching feeds, learning their weaknesses and how to exploit them. But nothing really prepared you for the first time you got to see one up close and personal. They were huge. The heat signatures displayed as white blobs, the short heavy rifles, red.
There was a clear line to an empty crate a few yards away. She raised her pistols. “Let’s move!” She took a step and looked back at the lifeboat. Cooper was just coming through the door. Their eyes met for a split second and then his face splattered against the wall of the vessel. A little spray of mist and he was gone. His body took two more headless steps and tumbled forward like oak tree.
Red tracer fire dashed against the side of the ship and exploded in red sparks. Bri leapt toward the crate and the exo threw her across the distance. She landed and turned as Kat cleared the doorway, stepped around Cooper’s body, and made two long jumps to get to Bri.
“He’s gone.” She grabbed Bri’s shoulder.
Bri nodded. She already knew it. “Right behind you.”
Burster fire clanked against the crates and Bri’s map showed close range Earther forces laying down blink cover fire. Deadly, but sporadic. Kat nodded and dashed into the dust and smoke. It was like they were back in pistol training. She fearlessly moved toward the enemy, using the exo’s strength to dodge small pockets of marines lost in the haze.
Bri dashed out behind her. It was easy to follow Kat, they had been side by side on countless scrimmages, both preferred striking from a distance. They kept moving, running and jumping as fast and far as they could without behind seen. Bri’s head was spinning.
Everywhere she looked she saw heat signatures, Earther marines either looking for them or running in the same direction, toward the facility where they planned a wholesale slaughter in the name of the Alliance.
Her heart was racing. Her visor displayed power cell information, distance to rendezvous, an overview of the terrain provided by unit 62’s drones, the one remaining drone with Cooper down. Her chest ached and she saw it again.
She blinked as Kat adjusted for a Marine who had turned and was emptying his weapon in their general direction. According to Anderson, Earther marine tech couldn’t see 37’s heat signature, something about a frequency shift. But they didn’t need to see them a field of railgun projectiles would cut them in half weather the soldier could see the target or not.
She leapt and ran and ducked and dodged. It seemed like every time she blinked, there was another group of marines, or blazing red tracers were whizzing by them.
They covered the ground as fast as they could and within two minutes, they were grouped at bravo.