jamming gear tuned to the transport so we don’t ring any bells unless they have towed metal detectors. Which this tub didn’t.
What the Tower did have, though, was gravity. It was in a nice spin that suggested a 360 surface pull. Probably not earth gravity, but enough so that we could run rather than float. I hate floating in a fight.
“Twenty seconds to soft dock,” our pilot called. We were all ready. Ten tough apes in EVA flexsuits, armed to the teeth and ready to kick a little gunrunner ass. We all had SolarAP cameras exterior-mounted on our helmets. We also had a ridealong in the person of Alex Tennet, a reporter for SolarAP. He used to be a big shot, but his career had been tanking for years. One of those guys who was never in the right part of the Solar System when anything interesting was happening. Bringing the tip about the gunrunners was the first big thing to happen to him in fifteen years, and he confided to me back on the transport, “You know, Sarge, if I hadn’t lucked into this…I’d be burning off the rest of my career doing weather reports on Ganymede.”
“Lucky you,” I said. He was a news guy, so I hated him on principle, but he was okay when the cameras were off. I didn’t like having to take him along on a raid, but the brass thought it would look good. A nice PR hit for us.
Like we need good PR. Or
So Tennet got to come along. Luckily I could switch his audio feed off so I didn’t have to listen to him give a blow-by-blow account of all this.
We docked without a sound, and the vibration was so soft through our ship that I knew it couldn’t be felt in the Tower.
“Jigsaw in place,” I reported.
“Zulu in place,” came the reply. Our brother team was soft-docked at the other airlock.
“Deploy blowback skirt.”
“Roger that, skirt deployed.”
“On my mark,” I said. “Everybody watch your fire and check your targets. Nobody dies who doesn’t have to. Everybody lives, everybody comes home.”
“Hooah,” I heard from everyone. The old Ranger cry was always a comfort right before a battle. It came with a hell of a lot of history, and most of that history was of success.
By now the pilots of both bullets would have spinners on the airlock wheels.
I counted it down.
On zero, the pilots initiated the hard-rips that spun the airlock wheels faster than any man could manage it, and the airlocks were literally torn open. The blowback skirts caught any flying debris and shot-injected oxygen into the airlocks. Then our hatches swung open and we used the elastic slings to launch ourselves from the Bullets into the airlocks. The skirts kept the docking collars pressurized, so we went straight for the inner hatches.
“It’s locked,” my corporal said.
“Blow it,” I growled.
He already had the burst patch attached with magnets and we wrapped our frag caps around us and did the ol’ duck-and-crouch as the patch blew apart the internal computers on the hatch. Tennet — the dumbass — tried to get a good shot of the blast, so I had to drag his ass down and under cover.
The second the locks were toast, Corporal Hastings yanked open the door.
“Go! Go! Go!” I bellowed and then we were all running into the Tower. I led the way with Hastings on my three o’clock and Tennet on my six. He could get some nice footage of my ass if he wanted. Maybe that would help his sorry ratings.
The corridor was dark so I threw Starbursts ahead of us. The little marble-sized LEDs ignited and flooded the corridor with blue light.
In my helmet mic I could hear the same process happening for Zulu team. Man, there’s nothing like military precision.
We raced through one hatch after another, at first finding nothing but huge machinery whose purpose I neither understood nor cared about; and then we hit the galley. This poor cook looks up, bent over an oven, holding a big tray of pot pies.
He had time to say, “What the fuck—?” before I kicked him in the nuts and pistol-whipped him to the deck. Yeah, I know, he’s just a cook. But if you’re working for the bad guys then you’re a bad guy. At least in my view, and it kept things nice and simple.
The adjoining corridor spilled out into a huge manufacturing plant that smelled of oil and sweat. There had to be fifty guys in there. Big sonsabitches, with the arms and shoulders you only get from hauling around pigs of iron or steel in a gravity environment. No space muscles. No flab.
Then something really weird happened, and from that point on everything went to shit.
One of the bad guys, a Turkish-looking man wearing a Kufi, pointed a big wrench at us and shouted: “Pirates!”
It all went crazy. The Turk swung the wrench at me with incredible force. The gravity was maybe half-earth, which means a big son of a bitch like him could swing a thirty pound wrench real damn fast. I tried to duck, but the edge of the wrench caught me on the shoulder pad and knocked me ten feet into a stack of pipes.
My gun discharged as I was hit and I stitched a line of rounds across the floor. I didn’t see the bullets hit, but I heard the screams.
And then the force of my body knocked the stack of pipes over and hundreds of pounds of half-inch pipes were hammering down on me. I dropped my gun and buried my head in my arms and curled my body into a ball. But even so I took a hell of a beating. Pipes whacked me in the shoulders and ribs and hips and thighs. The clang was like insanely loud. My visor cracked and I ducked inside my helmet to keep plastic splinters from blinding me.
Through it all I could hear the chatter of gunfire, yells, screams, and the unmistakable thud of heavy metal on flesh.
“Shit!” I cursed and tried to worm my way out from under. I had to get back into this fight. Suddenly two of the bars right over me were pulled back and I saw Hastings there, crouching down, pushing the bars aside. Tennet, the reporter, stood gawping behind him, his handheld camera shifting back and forth from the battle to me. He hadn’t lifted a frigging hand to help Hastings dig me out.
“Sarge!” Hasting yelled. “You all right?”
“Help me up,” I said. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out from under the pile, and I staggered as more of the pipes clanged and rolled down around me. There was a flash and a bang and suddenly Hastings was down, his faceplate smashed by a hard-shell flare and as I watched in total horror as the flare exploded inside his suit. Our flexsuits are designed to be fireproof. It’s saved our lives a hundred times…but the fire is supposed to be on the outside. The flare burst
A separate fire ignited inside of me. Pure white-hot rage!
Tennet caught the whole thing on camera and for a moment our eyes met. His face was white with shock but his eyes were alight. Adrenaline can do that. Even at the worst of times it can make you feel totally alive.
My rifle was gone, lost under all the debris, so I pulled my sidearm.
The room was a melee. The gunrunners badly outnumbered us and two of my guys were down. Dead or hurt I couldn’t tell. The rest had taken up shooting positions behind pieces of machinery, and they’d littered the deck with bodies. But the numbers were bad. The gunrunners had a variety of weapons — flares, hatchets, wrenches, hand-welders. No guns, which was kind of weird. They worked in teams, two men holding up a big piece of plate steel and moving it forward like a shield while others crowded behind it, throwing stuff, popping flares over the barricades behind which my guys hid. We had the better weapons, but they sure as hell had the numbers. And I could see more men pouring into the room from the far end.
I tapped my comlink and called for Zulu Team, but the unit was dead. It was smashed along with most of my helmet.
I pushed Tennet behind me and took up a shooting posture, legs wide and braced, weapon in a two-hand grip with my arms locked in a reinforced triangle. I fired careful shots and dropped six men with seven shots, and for a
