Jillian was inside first, dropping through the glowing red hole into the freighter. She hit the bulkhead at the first corridor she reached and launched herself to the left, heading toward engineering. Hernandez and Orm followed her.
“We’re on board,” Bobbie said on the command channel, back to Alex on the Storm. Their Laconian gear was modulating the signal to match the jamming, which would hopefully let their radio cut through, but Bobbie wasn’t entirely confident in the system. It didn’t really matter yet. Alex would be busy fighting the two frigates no matter what her team was doing. Any messages back and forth before the Storm had secured the freighter’s flight-space were perfunctory.
She followed into the breach, the other three members of the strike team close behind her. When Bobbie hit the corridor wall, she turned right, toward the command deck. The hallway they were in was actually the central lift of the ship, and closed hatches marked each deck they passed. Most of them would lead to cargo space. A few to the crew’s living quarters. One would lead to the ops deck, and that was the only one Bobbie cared about.
Jillian and her team would take control of the drive and life support down in engineering. Bobbie would take the ops deck and cut off communication with the outside world. If the political officer wasn’t in ops when she arrived, it wouldn’t matter. They’d control the ship and search at their leisure. For values of leisure up to maybe five or ten whole minutes.
“Watch those hatches,” she told her team as she skimmed along the bulkhead toward ops. It felt redundant. Their suits were scanning every square centimeter around them for heat, radiation, even the unique electromagnetic signature generated by a beating human heart. It was pretty tough to get the drop on someone wearing Laconian armor. But saying something reminded the team you were there, that you were in charge, and that keeping everyone safe was on your mind.
“Copy that,” Takeshi said. “Most of these aren’t warm. Guessing the cargo is in vacuum.”
“Guy in a vac suit coming at us from behind is low probability,” she agreed, “but low ain’t zero.”
Bobbie’s HUD flashed an overlay over a door one deck ahead. “That one,” she said, and her team fanned out and took positions around it. In the microgravity of the disabled freighter, they stood on bulkheads around the hatch, weapons ready. No matter what the orientation of the ship was under thrust, for purposes of the breach the ops deck was down.
“Remember,” Bobbie said, “there are potential friendlies in there.”
As she said it, a rotating 3-D profile of two women appeared on all their HUDs.
“Protect them first, take prisoners second. Copy?”
There came a rumble of assent. Bobbie slapped the wall panel next to the hatch, and her armor ran the breaching protocol that cut through the electronic security in a fraction of a second. The hatch slid open.
After that, everyone was shooting.
It was a fact of the human brain in close quarters combat that while everything was generally happening all at once, the mind insisted on trying to stitch it into a linear narrative when remembering it later.
In the moment, Bobbie threw herself through the hatch and into the ops deck, her team at her back. Incoming bullets lit up her HUD with bright trails so she’d know the direction of fire. Some of the bullets hit her, or her team. The armor thought the odds of taking real damage were trivial, and ignored it. Seven people in the compartment, wearing light protective armor. Her suit tagged one as a friendly. One of the two resistance partisans. Five with guns shooting at her. One doing his best to hide behind a crash couch. The political officer, if she had to guess.
Her arm moved without her thinking about it, and the gun mounted at her wrist spun up briefly, cutting two of the armed crew in half. The other three were turning into red spray and body parts under the barrage of fire from her team. The whole fight couldn’t have lasted more than two seconds, though when she remembered it later and her brain turned it into a narrative, it would seem much longer.
Less than thirty seconds after she’d opened the hatch, two of her strike team were protectively flanking the partisan, and Takeshi had the political officer shoved up against a bulkhead and was zip-tying his hands. Bobbie examined the deck. No hull breaches, her armor assured her. The Laconian antipersonnel rounds for shipboard use were pretty good tech. Lethal against lightly armored opponents, but they just fragmented into powder when they hit bulkheads.
“Ops is ours,” Bobbie said.
“Engineering is ours,” Jillian immediately replied. “We have one of the two spies. You got the other?”
“Copy. Our people are secure, and we have the package.”
“Oh goody,” Jillian said. “Can’t wait to see his face when he realizes his life just went down the recycler.”
“Jillian, escort the friendly up here,” Bobbie said. “Let’s get everyone into emergency suits and prep them for the ride over to the Storm. The rest of you, fan out and get an eyeball inventory. When the Storm arrives we’re going to want to take all the best stuff with us, and we won’t have much time. Get to it.”
“Copy that,” Jillian said.
“I think we win,” Bobbie said to Takeshi. He grinned back at her.
“Easy peas—” he started to say and then blew apart.
Bobbie knew intellectually that they must have taken a raking pass from someone’s PDCs. But from inside the ship it looked like the bulkheads on either side of the compartment decided to explode in several dozen places all at once. The room was full of glowing shrapnel bouncing off walls and panels, and the gray smoke of vaporized metal. Takeshi was a tangle of technology-wrapped body parts floating in a nebula of blood globes.
It didn’t look like anyone else was directly hit, but before Bobbie could even start to issue an order, the air in the room was just gone. Too many holes on both sides. One moment they were in a pressurized cabin, the next they were in vacuum. It happened so fast it barely ruffled the political officer’s Laconian blue suit jacket.
“Get them in suits!” she yelled, but it was already too late. She was a Martian. She’d started doing vacuum drills in grade school. Fifteen seconds and you lose consciousness. Anything that you needed to do had to happen in that first fifteen seconds or it didn’t happen at all. Any vacuum suit that is more than fifteen seconds away is a lifetime away.
All she could do was watch the partisan who’d helped them take the ship gasp out a cloud of mist that was her very last breath ever. The political officer, their whole reason for coming, died a moment later with a look of profound puzzlement on his face. A thousand facts and secrets that could have meant the difference between the underground thriving and all of them dying in a gulag evaporated as the man’s cells gave up.
Every panel on the ops deck that still worked was flashing red. The ship was dead too.
“Storm, this is strike team,” Bobbie said, opening the command channel. She heard only dead air and the faint hiss of background radiation. “Storm, come in.”
Nothing.
“Shit,” Jillian said. She came into the ops deck dragging their dead ally from the engineering deck with her. “Did we lose the Storm too?”
“Chama,” Bobbie said, pointing at one of her people. “Get outside and see if you can spot the Storm. Maybe line-of-sight comms will work. The rest of you, mission hasn’t changed. Get me that inventory. Get it ready for rapid transfer once we find the ship.”
“Or,” Jillian said, “get ready to fall into Jupiter and die because we’re way under orbital speed now and don’t have an engine.”
“Or that,” Bobbie agreed, surprised at how much she wanted to push across the room and punch Jillian in the face. “But until we do, we’ll stay on mission. Get the fuck out of here and make yourself useful packing cargo.”
On the radio, one of Jillian’s squad mates said, “Lots of stuff here, boss. Ammo, fuel, it’s the mother lode. Primary mission is fucked, but secondary is a win.”
“A moral victory, I guess,” Bobbie sighed.
“You know who talks about moral victories?” Jillian asked as she floated out of the room. “The team that lost.”
Chapter Eight: Naomi