Samuel tapped the nameplate on his chest, the word ‘Hyst’ now burned away, leaving only a black streak through the metal.
“Without the stencil how can you even know it’s me in here?” asked Samuel before he shook his head and slung his rifle over his shoulder. “I am getting sentimental in my old age.”
“I like that about you,” said Sura with a gentle laugh as she rested her arms around his shoulders and raised herself up on her tiptoes to deeply kiss his darkened faceplate, and then pulled back to look where she thought his eyes were. “This is a second skin, that gets the job done and brings Samuel back to me.”
“Not always in one piece,” said Samuel as Sura stepped back so that the marine could move through their small room towards the door as the starship shook from turbulence.
“You stitch together just fine, marine,” observed Sura warmly as her eyes appeared to sparkle, tilting her head ever so slightly to the side even as she turned on the balls of her feet a few degrees, giving her husband a last eyeful of her smooth neckline and the swell of her curves, a promise of what waited for him upon his return. “Good hunting.”
The door closed behind Samuel, and he started to take a step down the corridor, before stopping. He turned, and almost opened the door again. The marine lowered his hand and then leaned forward to rest his forehead against the metal of the door. He closed his eyes and fought against the urge to go back inside. After more turbulence shook his eyes open, the marine straightened up and walked down the corridor towards his mission with resolve.
Sura still stood on her side of the door, with her head against the metal, the tears falling from her eyes splashing across her bare feet. Her own mission would be plenty dangerous, and it was not only her husband who was going to get shot at today. Samuel would no doubt be furious with her if they both survived what was coming, but she had known better than to fill him in on the details. She knew the Rig in ways that he had yet to learn, and if they were going to make a life here, both of them had to do their part. Sura pulled on her boots, affixed her tactical harness, and pulled her long coat over her shoulders.
Let him have one clean fight, she told herself as she picked up her lever action rifle with one hand and wiped away her tears with the other, before he learns the truth.
“Mind the wheel, Corin, this rover is worth more than you are,” growled Narek as the former battle trooper’s body was shaken hard against the restraints keeping him in the passenger seat next to the young merc who drove the all-terrain vehicle. “Besides we wouldn’t want our war hero to chuck his breakfast before the shooting starts.”
Samuel chose not to respond to the trooper’s jibe and simply held himself firm in his seat just behind Narek. His own restraints were pulled taut as they kept him in place while the surprisingly nimble vehicle rushed across the rocky terrain.
Despite the trooper’s mean-spirited banter, which had been constant since the group of gunmen had gathered in loading deck of the Rig for a short briefing before deployment, he was right about the rover itself. The vehicle rode high on six wheels and three axles, each one operating independently so that the rover could overcome most any terrain. The cab seated the six gunmen comfortably, and the additional plexiglass armor affixed to the titanium roll cage made visibility easy while still yielding some degree of protection from ambush.
Behind Samuel stood Garn, one of the other mercs, with his hands at the ready upon a light machine gun currently affixed to a mount on the top of the roll cage.
The weapon was old, a Fenrir Industries brand urban assault model, discontinued after being used to horrific effect by gun cults during the Torrid Uprising. While the weapon was illegal in nearly every system in corporate space, and ammunition was likely very difficult to come by, Samuel was happy to have it on their side. He’d have preferred Ben Takeda or Harold Marr and their Grotto heavy machine guns at his back, but out here on the ragged edge of civilization, Samuel took what he could get.
The other two mercs in the rover with him, Jayce and Michael, were more like Corin, in that they were mercs of no particularly distinguishing characteristics. Just three men who fell into a life of the gun, wearing patchwork armor and carrying whatever weapon suited them, instead of anything standard issue. Whether they had formal military training or not, they had no doubt proven themselves in the eyes of Narek, who led them in a manner not dissimilar to the long-dead Boss Taggart. They reminded him in a way of how he tended to see the new marines that filled the empty armor of fallen friends. Of all the Reapers who came and went in Tango Platoon over the years, the medic, Holland, and the flame trooper, Gretchen, who was now presumably the mother of Ben’s child if she was still alive, were the only ones he could clearly remember. Only those marines with whom he went through basic were crystal clear in his mind, the rest were lost in the churn of war and salvage.
Samuel looked out across the front of the rover and could, at last, see the columns of debris smoke that rose from over the ridge ahead. The wind on the planet was a wicked thing, proving rather strong and unpredictable, and the swirling pillars of dust and rock going from the ground to the sky above dotted the landscape. What made those in front of them different is that these were tinged with black, which Samuel knew was from the ink-rock that was being mercilessly torn from the planet’s sub-surface by an as yet unknown mining operation.
Samuel knew nothing about them, other than the modest intel they’d been given at the briefing. Braden’s drone captured shots of a relatively small mining operation, one of the pre-fab compounds and drilling rigs that was of the same style, even if smaller, than what the Rig Halo would deploy.
There were an estimated twenty human beings present in and around the complex, though with atmospheric conditions being what they were it was difficult to know for sure. It stood to reason that the operation would have a support ship somewhere on the planet, though it had not yet been located. Though it had not been specifically mentioned in the briefing, Samuel thought it likely that Captain Dar intended to use Narek’s violent disruption of the mining operation to flush out the support ship. 2216 was an unclaimed world, open to exploitation by anyone with the capacity to take it and hold it. The marine knew as well as anyone that if a major play was discovered, more than a single score for a lucky freelancer, it would only be a matter of time before corporate forces would arrive to fight it out and build a major factory operation. Any independent prospector operation was wise to fill their cargo hold and make a hard burn for the black, whether they were leaving a play behind or not, as there would always be someone coming to contest the claim or seize it outright.
“Two miles from the target, boys,” said Narek in his ragged voice, his accent combining with what Samuel presumed to be some old battle wound that gave his voice an almost comical grit. “If they’ve got snipers or bushwhackers in place we’ll be rousing them soon, so keep your heads behind that glass.”
According to the briefing the team of gunmen were to make a bold assault on the compound, rushing in and overwhelming the rig staff before any real firefights could break out. There were in fact only six of them moving against a compound with at least twenty hostiles, though most, if not all of them would be non-military. That wasn’t to say that they wouldn’t be armed, but that unless they had their own mercs on the payroll, these people would be laborers and tech staff, none of whom were likely to put up much of a fight.