'Great flying, boss!' Skinny said over the net. 'Looks like we got ourselves a doorway to boot!'
'Roger that! Into the hole, Saviors!' Bigguns ordered.
Chapter 21
2:18 PM Mars Tharsis Standard Time
The Saviors ripped through bulkhead after bulkhead until they pushed into the side of a large engineering room. There had been almost zero resistance and only the occasional e-suited soldier firing HVAR rounds at them. The ship must have undoubtedly been flying on a skeleton crew given the kamikaze mission part of its original plan. There were no mecha left on the ship and there was little any poorly armored Seppy groundpounders or squids could do to hold up a bunch of Marines in FM-12s. The Marines had plowed through the ship pretty much unabated by anything other than their own size—they were much larger than hallways and doorways of a spaceship. Several times they had to go to guns to blast a path for them to travel through because the bulkheads and decks were too close together for the FM-12s to fit through. But that was okay, as the FM-12s were loaded with ordnance and Marines loved to use it.
The Marines had kept to the hangar decks and belowdeck engineering sections as best they could because these were bigger decks designed for moving cargo and mecha around in. Several cargo rooms were large enough to accommodate them, but they weren't there for comfort. They had a bomb to find and/or a ship to stop before it reached the planet below. They needed to hurry.
The engineering room they had just burst into was part of the power generation plant that had been hammered by the DEG of the
The large room was filled with spewing busted flowlines and sparking broken wiring harnesses. Liquid metal coolant lines poured molten sodium alloys out into the corner of the ship. There was a pocket of the coolant building up that was trapped in a force field. The force field was sapping power from somewhere and as soon as that went the deck would be flooded with molten liquids. Bigguns thought it would be best to get out of this room quickly. It looked like the whole damned thing was gonna cave in on them.
There were flames roiling in several corners of the gymnasium-sized compartment. Smoke filled the dimly lit section the Saviors had entered but that was of little hindrance to the Marines who were using QM, IR, visible, radar, and lidar sensors anyway. Bigguns scanned the room looking for the right path to take.
'Okay, Marines. Let's tear this fucking rust bucket apart, starting with the far section of the room! The nuke is on the other side of that wall. Let's move fast!' Bigguns ordered. 'Guns, guns, guns!' She set her DEG and cannons blasting at the highlighted target. The other FM-12s did the same.
Secondary explosions filled the compartment and a gaping hole into a larger room on the other side of the bulkhead was blown out. The Marines rushed inward covering each other in case of enemy fire, but there was none.
The torpedo room was about twice the size of the gymnasium-sized engineering deck and was lined from wall- to-wall with empty tubes. The ceiling of the room contained four different torpedo racks and each of them was loaded with missiles.
'Skinny, cover me. The rest of you goldbrickers knock us a hole in one of those torpedo tubes so we can get the fuck out of here!' Bigguns pointed with the giant robot hand of her mecha toward the port torpedo tube and then fired her jump boosters to the top of the room. Skinny followed suit, scanning her DEG left and right and up and down in case of any resistance from the Seppies. There was none.
Bigguns quickly studied the missile rack and decided on a plan. She grabbed the nose of the missile where the warhead was and then looked down the missile tube for a vulnerable point in the casing.
