Chapter 4

4-----------------------

Corporal Sonya Nero’s fingers danced across her PCI as she changed frequencies between the Marine Tac-Comm, Cavalier Squadron’s channel, and the mute key about as quickly as a bachelor changes TV stations. It was because she had to yell at three different groups of assholes at the same time, but for very different reasons.

“I’ve got it handled, Sergeant. Go help the Clover ‘sport.”

“It’s not my call, kid,” Sergeant Decker replied, sounding uninterested in debate. “Deploy on Synapse-1 and tell Byrd to dust-off immediately. We’re coming in.”

“The people on Clover 4—“

“—will be fine. Decker out.”

“Goddammit!”

A marine on the other side of the Magnum ripped off his helmet to puke all over the floor. By now, the extreme pitching and g-forces of the shuttle—brought on by Corporal Byrd’s evasive flying—barely registered on Nero’s senses. Call it experience and a solid pair of ‘sea-legs’ or maybe it was just that she has the good sense to take her meds. This fucking greenie’s head was going to explode if he wasn't careful. She punched the mute.

“Hey! You! What’s his name? That guy, what’s his name?”

“Cannonball!” someone called out.

“Cannonball, put your helmet on, you stupid motherfucker! I don’t care you gotta puke! Learn to breathe it, fuckhead. You wanna die? Take your meds next time. Unbelievable.”

“Sixty seconds!” shouted Birdman from the cockpit. The lights in the shuttle dropped, and the Marines’ helmet optics automatically kicked up their light exposure to compensate. It was an equipment check. The induction implants in her hands tingled with a subtle electric current that doctors insisted she shouldn’t feel because of the pain filters they spliced into her spinal cord after her injury. But she could never get it configured properly. The damage was severe and the editor’s functionality was based on thresholds. She had no control over it.

“Sixty seconds,” Nero repeated. She taps her PCI again.

“He’s coming in! Cole Slaw man he’s coming right in front of you.”

“I got it I got it I got it I got it…”

“Slider you crazy bitch get back here! You got ‘em scared of you; they ain’t scared of me!”

“Alright! I’m—hang on! Hang on. Fuck! I can’t get over there. I’m--”

“Slider? Slider?”

“Pinball, I think we’ve lost Hustler, too.”

“Copy that. Nero, I’ve done all I can. You’ve got incoming.”

“Forty seconds,” shouted Birdman.

“Good luck on your end,” she said into the radio, “signing off for now.”

Nero grabbed her weapon from the rack and slung it. She threw her harness off to stand by the airlock hatch that forms the back of the shuttle. During her last two tours through Kuiper this sort of thing happened so often she didn’t have to say a single word. Nobody did. It was a strange calm before the storm, filled not with nervous energy but with the destructive surety the hurricane feels before it levels a city. Sonya Lee Nero really missed that feeling now, because she was looking at a boatful of cherries, about three-quarters of whom were rookies who’d never seen a combat tour. They were scared. They knew what to do, but they didn't really know because they’d never done it. She needed to explain it to them in thirty seconds or less.

“Listen up!” Everyone’s heads swung around to look at her, each a faceless visor except for their callsigns painted on the side. “Get on your feet. I realize that none of you cherries have a fucking clue who I am. Doesn’t matter who I am. What does matter is that we’re looking at about thirty boarders attacking a custom cruiser using Needle hullbreaker insertion craft, due to hit the dorsal side.”

“Their objectives are hostage-taking and securing the bridge. When they hit they’ll be scattered all over the cruiser in pairs. The ship is gonna lose atmo, and the flak has already knocked off main power. The ship has a central corridor on the control deck. Perfect Twenty will stay aft and cover that chokepoint with sniper fire. We hold that, we keep them isolated. From there, fire teams flash and clear rooms. Civvies should be holed up in the canteen, a room away from the outer hull, but they won’t all be there.”

“Check your seals, check your weapon, and for fuck’s sake check your fire. I got Decker bitching my ear off how much shit’s gonna rain down on us if you shoot some pasty Ph.D. fucker in a white coat or his terminal. Hooah?”

The shuttle thumped against the side of the Synapse Corporation’s cruiser. Nero could hear the short airlock sleeve fasten together outside and the pressure is equalized so quickly it sounds like a lion roaring outside. Nero activated the airlock control and stood aside, pushing Marines through and telling them to clear the hatch ASAP. She formed them into four two-man fire teams, leaving Perfect Twenty to operate autonomously by the airlock. Nero was the last out. Birdman broke contact as soon as she secured the airlock behind her. She hated to leave him with such thin fighter cover out there, but he knew the score as well as she did. Best that he stayed mobile.

There was no centrifugal gravity on cruisers like this. The Marines were trained for combat in zero-g, but in such conditions it wasn't so much fighting as it is trying not to hurt oneself, especially when trying to fire a 5.56mm automatic rifle while floating.

All of them were wearing magnetic boots as a part of their gear, which had improved greatly in allowing someone to maintain a regular stride, but in combat situations were much less-reliable. Move too erratically for the sensors to know when to anticipate the next step and you’d lurch about like Frankenstein’s monster, only with a lot more cursing and sprained ankles. The sensors didn't behave well to abrupt changes in gait, so a lot of time in zero-g training was devoted to precise footwork, balance, and timing. It wasn't uncommon to see Marines strut in place during an op like a marching band marking time. Sometimes they'd even hum walking tunes.

The manual release for the boots was a little button on the back of her gauntlet, just over the fingernail of her ring finger. She pressed it and pushed off the nearby wall to drift near Perfect Twenty. The other Marines were bracing for the coming series of impacts. If they breached the central corridor the decompression was going to be nasty. It might even rip them off their feet, with or without their boots.

She’d been on one early-model Spacebus, put together so badly the first breaching craft broke the ship’s spine. The decompression tore the entire dorsal side away like a peel-and-eat shrimp. It was in her mind often when she awoke to the sensation of falling. Falling upward.

Nero tapped her PCI into the ship’s public address system. “This is Corporal Nero of the United States Space Marine Corps. Remain where you are until given the all-clear.”

“Good afternoon, Corporal Nero,” replied a woman on her headset radio, and judging from the lack of response from the other Marines, her radio alone. “The crew is assembled in the dining area on B-Level as you requested.”

“You’ve done a head count?”

“I’m afraid two crew members were killed when the ship was damaged,” she said. She almost sounded disingenuous when she speaks. She was surprisingly calm considering the situation. “But the survivors are accounted for. The first boarding craft will collide with this ship in thirty-seven seconds. I’m afraid I can’t help you further.”

“Don’t worry about it. Thanks for the heads-up.”

Nero racked the slide on her assault rifle and thumbed off the safety. Decker’s shuttle was never going to make it in time. She tapped two other Marines near the airlock hatch—from the names painted on their helmets they go by the handles Tabby and Take-Out—and told them to follow her.

“Where are you going?” asked O-Face, who tried to catch up to her in a hustle.

“The airlock.”

“Okay. Why?”

Nero ushered the three Marines into the airlock, stepped after them, and cycled out the atmosphere. Then they waited.

“Because we’re going outside.” Nero couldn't see their faces, but she guessed they were all confused. She muttered something about them all being cherries. “Okay. A two-man fire squad deploys from an insertion craft. First thing they need to do is get through the doors, and to do that they’ll either burn ‘em, blow ‘em, or hotwire ‘em. And that’s going to take a minute because most rooms on the exterior are pretty well reinforced. While they’re doing that, we hit them from outside before they regroup.”

“But that’s crazy,” Take-Out protested, “spacewalking without a tether? We never trained to do anything like that.”

“Really?” The others nodded urgently. Nero pretended to ponder this for a second. “That’s a shame.” She clapped Take-Out on the shoulder. “Adaptability, kid. The mark of any good Marine.”

The floor dropped out from under them as a wave of two dozen rocket-propelled metal stakes impaled the ship. But their feet were stuck to the deck, so they dropped with it, so rapidly that she almost coughed up her own heart. She could feel the rush of pressure escape the central corridor through the deck plates, followed by the deep thrumming of explosions as the Needles blew off their warhead tips and ejected soldiers.

“Corporal, this is Twenty,” she heard on her radio. “I count six in the corridor. They’ve dropped in with barricades and they’re tossing mines in front of them to keep us from rushing.”

“Get some grenades past them before they get settled,” Nero responded. She opened the outer door that led directly into space and vaulted unfettered from the airlock to stand on the cruiser’s cratered hull in a move that must have made the rookies nearly shit themselves. “And stay in position. They’re digging in until their buddies get the doors open and they’re not going to get as much backup as they think.”

Nero pulled the others outside by the collars of their armor. She pushed them along before they had a moment to gawk at the silent war boiling around them. She reminded them to focus instead on the white metal beneath their feet, and sent O-Face with Tabby starboard. She and Take-Out plodded towards the puckered and scorched holes in the ship, near which drift the slowly-spinning husks of the Needles blown loose by the deployment charges.

She grabbed a grenade from Take-Out’s bandoleer as they approached the nearest breach. She set the fuse and tossed it inside with barely a look. A white flash rumbled in her shins. On that cue, she set her foot down on the inward-curved metal of the hole, stepped through, and put her other foot on the ceiling of the room so that she kneelt upside-down relative to the floor.

She could see the brutalized remains of cubicles and white-collar workstations blown all over the room. Distressed copiers and burnt clippings from the funny pages drifted, spinning ceaselessly though the vacuum. Broken glass, ash and shredded paper filled the space like the inside of a snow globe. Nero could see one Russian in his bulky armored suit, floating detached from one of his legs which stood stuck to the deck. Spherical, undulating globules of blood dribbled from the arteries of the dead man’s stump. The other was thrown against the doors in an attempt to shield himself from the grenade blast.

She shot them both anyway to be sure, then levered herself back outside.

“Jesus, that was fast.” said Take-Out. “Do you even need me for this?”

“Yeah, and you need to be fast too. See that one?” --she pointed her finger at another drifting Needle—“take them out, and move on. If you draw fire, back out and call for me. Got it?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Go.”

The civvies were going to be pissed at all the collateral damage being caused with all of these grenades. Not that they had much room to complain, but they would anyway.

She approached a group of holes near the fore of the transport, as well as the breaches in the central corridor. They were close together, meaning there would be several groups of raiders together, and they’d be watching for her little “gopher hole” trick while one team works on the door. It’d been long enough that they’ll be through the doors any second if they were trying to burn them out with chemical foam as usual.

“Twenty, are they through yet?”

“Almost. What’s going on out there? Where are you?”

“Setting up a crossfire. Listen, first thing they’ll do once the doors come down is throw out scrap grenades. Stay behind cover and let them settle behind the barricades. Just put enough fire on them to keep their heads down.”

The other nearby Marines hurried over at her call. Nero lay prone and angled her weapon through the perforated hull. The others followed her lead, each peering down into the corridor from above. She closed her eyes, flexing her hand around the grip of her rifle so that her index finger fits into the weapon’s interface port situated near the trigger guard. A tickling rush of sensory input flooded in through her gauntlet, into the induction implant in her hand, and up the cables in her arm hardlined into her spinal column.

There was always a moment when jacking into the TargetLink at first, where everything seemed too large, too bright. The world pressed in too closely in full-on claustrophobic Technicolor. She wanted to back away from what she’s seeing, or shut her eyes only to find that she had no control to close the scope of her rifle. She was the rifle. The optics were better than human eyes could ever hope to be, and they came in straight to her cortex in high-definition digital video, color-corrected and enhanced for lighting. Everything was in sharp focus at every edge of her peripheral vision. She couldn't narrow her concentration to a specific object except to mentally adjust the zoom of the scope.

She could see what’s left of the Crimson Tide pirates who managed to hit the corridor. They managed to secure thick alloy barricades to the floor, deployed with them when their Needles dropped them into the ship. But the time they spent bolting them down ensured their sacrifice; Nero saw their bodies perforated by frag grenades that her squad had thrown past the shields. The bodies stirred uselessly against the barricades.

Scalding chemical fumes vented off into space from several hallway doors; the Russians were about to torch the hydraulics that held the doors shut.

“My team: hold your fire until I give the word. I want them in the corridor before we take them out.” Her own voice sounded strange as she spoke, the way her senses were divided between the rifle and her body. It sounded like someone else reading her lines.

She pulled back. She’d hear when the Russians made their move.

Her vision tremored, and she could feel something like hailstones fly into her back and legs. She jacked out of the TargetLink just as a scream sounded out over her headset. She rolled to her side and saw Take-Out, his armor shredded and full of shrapnel crafted from scrap metal and nails. He dropped his rifle and clutched at his throat, blood streaming out from between his fingers, carried out into void by the vacuum. He was dead already but it was going to take him a few minutes for it to be official. They were all going to hear every last second of it until he choked out his last breath.

“Corporal, they’ve breached the doors!” shouted Twenty.

“Grenade!” reported another.

Something kicked her in the groin, and again in her thigh. Her leg went numb from the impact. Numb was scary; either it was just a glancing, harmless shot or it was a wound so bad it caused her pain filter to kick in. She rolled to her belly in the direction of the shots, already dreading that her armor had been pierced and she was as dead as Take-Out. Flechette spines covered the plates over her spine and backside like a porcupine. Muzzle flares drew her attention to one of the breaches that Take-Out should have cleared. Red domed helmets peeked out, their rifles sweeping the hull in an attempt to pick them off from behind.

“God damn it!” she grimaced. “Where the fuck is Decker?” She braced her rifle up to her shoulder and gave them a burst. Her footing was bad and her aim terrible in this position. The recoil sent her sliding a bit, causing her to scramble to put her boot down. She really hoped she wasn't going to die from being shot in the crotch, but she didn't see anything leaking. Maybe she'd lucked out.

Nero traded fire with the pirates. O-Face nailed one in the faceplate, exploding the poor bastard’s head instantly. The other Russian dropped down into the ship again. Nero signaled the others to take him out. All this occurred in the span of twenty seconds, and it may have been long enough to pooch the entire op. She cursed and peered back down into the corridor within the ship.

About ten pirates were entrenched behind the barricades, laying down a brutal amount of cover fire so their comrades could work unimpeded. Nero hurled a grenade straight down amidst them and cut loose with her rifle. She emptied her magazine into their backs and ducked just before the explosive detonated. She reloaded with mechanical efficiency and put a couple of rounds into anything that she thought might still be moving under its own power.

Take-Out had stopped moving, so she gathered his limp body over her shoulder. “Check in.”

“The corridor’s clear, Corporal,” said Twenty, “But they’ve moved into the central lift. I think they’re going for hostages.”

“They didn’t take the bridge?”

“Negative. I don’t think they ever tried. They had almost a minute to work on that door if they’d wanted.”

“We’re dropping in. Hold your fire.”

The Marines regrouped amongst the barricades after they cleared the Russian mines. Nero was already halfway to the nearest the maintenance shaft; they didn't have any time to lose. She tried to raise Magnum Gold on her PCI, but got no response from the Sergeant.

“Where the fuck is Decker?”

“I’ve been monitoring the radar and open channels,” that strange woman replied. Nero wasn’t aware she'd been speaking on her radio. “Your Marine channels are encoded, of course, but I lost radar contact with Magnum Gold. I believe that the ship has been destroyed.”

That put her in charge, quick as a Vulcan cannon. Whoever ordered Decker to fly across that entire engagement to dock with Synapse-1 signed his death warrant along with eight other Marines.

The medic, Private Fulton, tried to slow her down so he could dig the shrapnel out of her ass and patch her armor. She told him to buzz off.

“Corporal, I’m currently tracking the three surviving Russian intruders and--“

“Tracking? How?”

“This ship has a ubiquitous system of cameras and microphones installed, allowing me to monitor both the interior and exterior of this vessel,” the woman replies with Buddha-like patience. “I beg your pardon, but I’m compelled to ask for your attention. The Russians are currently outside the main lift on C-deck. They’re discussing the prospect of suicide. They don’t seem confident that they alone can secure the capture of the ship.”

Nero kept climbing down, “Suicide? You’re sure?”

“Quite sure.”

A harried voice broke in from the Marine Tac-Comm. “Nero, this is Birdman. The fighters are converging on your position. I think they’re going to try and destroy Synapse-1.”

“A logical conclusion.”

“You’d better brace for missile impact. Gold and Alpha wings are putting up a hell of a fight but these guys seem to be fighting to the last man.”

“Okay,” Nero sighed, “Stay clear. We’ll ride it out here.”

She led everyone into the maintenance shaft where a missile detonation on the forward quarter shook the squad around like a ball bearing in a can of spray paint. Their armor kept them from breaking or bruising, but it left them tenderized. She eavesdropped on the fighter squadron frequency long enough to figure out that they were probably going to live, but Synapse’s insurance agent might have a stroke when he got the damage estimate.

There was air pressure down here at last, so they closed the hatches behind them in the tunnel to keep from exposing the entire level to vacuum. These areas had manual pumps to cycle air in events of breach and power failure exactly such as this. Private Fulton finally cornered Nero while the others worked the valve. He sprayed an ugly rubberlike epoxy over her damaged armor plates and goes to work with a putty knife. It looked like she was getting her ass spackled by a perverted space mason but everyone here was too thrashed to make jokes about it.

By the time the Marines dropped down to C-deck, the Russians lay dead, all from self-inflicted rifle wounds. Nero had never seen anything like this before. Why would a bunch of pirates commit suicide to avoid capture? For most of them life in prison was an upgrade; at least it meant regular meals. She’d never seen their regular army resort to it either. This whole thing stunk of espionage. None of it made any sense.

“I tried to speak to them but they wouldn’t listen to reason.”

“What the hell is going on here,” Nero demanded. “What’s on this ship so valuable that anyone would stage a raider attack to steal it? Codes? Some VIP?”

“Both conjectures are correct in their own ways. For your own safety, please step into the conference room to your left.”

Nero noticed that everyone could now hear the woman as she addressed them over the PA. She and Tabby pulled Private Gonzalez’s body into the hall where it was relatively safe and collected his tags. She figured that she should feel worse about it, but she didn't. All she felt is god damn lucky that a lot more weren’t killed. Especially herself. Survivor’s guilt was a bitch of a problem with no easy solution. Either you dealt with it or you didn’t. Sonya Lee Nero dealt with it because she had to. She couldn't go back to a normal life because she had nothing to return to. Not anymore.

“Corporal?” Perfect Twenty tapped her arm, making her start.

“Yeah, I know. Just memorizing his name.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah. Hell of a first day is all.”

They entered the conference room, a well-furnished but sterile meeting area with abstract art on the walls and comfortable swiveling bucket seats around a long Formica table. On the wall at the head of the table was a large monitor screen displaying an exterior view of the Synapse cruiser and the battle taking place around it.

“Please make yourselves comfortable,” they heard from the television. “You can view the battle from here if you like. Perhaps you would prefer some music while you wait?”

“Are you serious?” said Cannonball incredulously. “Who the fuck is this?”

“My name is Saras. I suggest Vivaldi, or perhaps Aaron Copeland. I find that their music has a soothing influence on—“

“Holy shit, you’re a computer ain’t ya?”

“I am a self-adaptive reasoning artificial sentience with data mining and soft-logic capabilities. A prototype master system developed by the Synapse Corporation, Private Poole. My existence was meant to be secret until my installation at Sisyphus-1 because of the risk of theft.”

“Things seem to be clearing up outside. Would you care to listen to some selections from The Four Seasons while you wait for your shuttle to return? Or Appalachian Spring?”