Samuel had been willing to share stories from his time with the Reapers of Baen 6, though the campaign that had scarred him the deepest had been the liquidation of Vorhold. He would speak little of it, though had been willing to share the story of a man named Vol.
The revolver had belonged to the downspire ganger, who had wielded it with a savage grace as he fought alongside Samuel in the bitter darkness. Apparently, after Vol died in the rescue of several marines, Ben Takeda among them, Samuel’s leader Wynn Marsters ended up with it. Boss Marsters had carried it for years in the Ellisian trade war, though after the Reaper strike had bequeathed it to Samuel for his journey onto the frontier.
It was crafted for rough use, capable of utilizing nearly any sort .44 caliber ammunition, whether those were the sleekly manufactured cartridges produced by Fenrir Industries or the homemade wildcat rounds that were more common among the destitute and the daring. The bayonet, which slid across well-oiled rails on the bottom of the weapon’s barrel, made it equally devastating as a close quarters weapon.
With his hands wrestling for control of the shotgun, and certainly not anticipating a revolver with a bayonet, the man had only a moment to register what was coming. Sura howled in a mixture of combat fury and disappointment at the sudden, but not unexpected, downturn of events as she drove the blade through the man’s neck, the point of the weapon punching through the other side of the man’s flesh.
The second guard leveled his shotgun at his comrade’s back and paused, still in shock at the manner of the man’s unlikely death and seemingly unsure of whether to shoot or not. Sura twisted her wrist to force the angle of her gun sideways instead of upright, and the bayonet tore an even greater wound in the dying man’s throat as she did so. Now the barrel was clear of the first guard’s body, and Sura fired on the second guard just as he desperately squeezed the trigger of his shotgun.
The combo revolver thundered as it hurled a heavy round through the second guard’s chest, the force of it picking him up and throwing him backward against the stairwell. The guard fired a microsecond after Sura, and his aim was spoiled by the impact of the projectile.
The cloud of shot ripped into the right side of the first guard’s body, finally ending his life and making his knees buckle. Sura was protected from the blast, though the power of it knocked her off balance and sent her tumbling down the remainder of the stairwell along with the corpse of the man she’d skewered.
Sura’s head bounced off the hard edge of one of the last stairs, and her world went black. An instant later her eyes fluttered open and she felt a hand grasping her collar and dragging her by the coat across the metal flooring of the compound. Her vision swam as she looked up, and when it came into focus a moment later she saw that it was Captain Dar pulling her.
The captain was keeping up a high rate of fire, moving his weapon this way and that, giving Sura the impression that he was trying to keep heads down more than he was trying to hit anything, or anyone, in particular. She looked back, over her boots, and saw a body dressed in worker’s coveralls sprawled upon the deck, and off in a distance made hazy by the gritty wind that ceaselessly blew across the rig, she saw other people running and returning fire.
Dar let go of her once he’d gotten Sura behind a large stack of drill pipes. As the captain reloaded, Sura gathered herself and shook the last of the cobwebs from her mind. Her head was bleeding, and she could see fresh red dripping down on her neck and onto her shoulder. Head wounds bled profusely, even minor injuries, and so the blood was no indication of how bad it might be. Either way, she’d need attention quickly, though in the heat of a gunfight, time had a way of grinding to a crawl, and for that she was thankful.
Sura realized that she still had the revolver in her hands, and the sight of it reminded her of why they’d come armed in the first place. Surely it was customary and prudent to be armed at all times in necrospace, and nobody would fault them for that, not even at a tense business negotiation, though the real reason was the drill. They had to stop the prospectors from hurling an explosive down the chute.
“They’re going for the drill!” shouted Dar as he turned from his firing position and crouched down to reload his own pistol, “Get back in the fight, Kameni!”
The use of her maiden name snapped Sura back to attention, cutting through the haze of her head trauma. Technically speaking, though she went by the name Sura Hyst, she and Samuel had been divorced for years. It had been part of their bid for freedom years ago once, to release she and Orion from any debts Samuel might incur, now that their life bonds were cleared. She and the marine had never formally re-married and had just gone on living their lives as if it had been only a matter of paperwork. Captain Dar called her by her maiden name when he wanted to express his feelings for her, which she knew by now were more genuine and complex than physical desire. He was an honorable man, at least when it came to his crew, and had never pressed the matter beyond the use of Kameni. It was a minor trespass, and one she admitted that she had never objected to or asked him to correct. At that moment the cascade of conflicting emotions brought her to full alertness.
Sura cocked the hammer of her revolver and used her off hand to rotate the cylinder over to one of the flare rounds. She leaned out of cover and fired it at the center of the platform, the round streaking through the swirling dust and slamming into a piece of large machinery. The flare illuminated the platform only marginally, but the multitude of micro-reflections cast by the wind-borne particle storm was enough to elevate the ambient light enough for she and Dar to see their enemy. No sooner had she done that than a prospector sprinted across the platform towards the primary drill mount and gripped tightly in his hands was a rock melter, one of the focused charges often used to start a new drill chute.
Sura’s revolver roared as she fired at the running man, though her shot went wide and bit into a pylon, doing little more to the prospector but shower him with sparks. Dar had better luck, and his bullet thudded into the rival prospector’s ribs, sending him spiraling and crashing to the deck. The executive who’d called himself Kat leaned out from behind a large metal crate and returned fire with a small pistol he must have had secreted away in his waistband, driving both Dar and Sura back into cover even as one of his guards attempted to work his way close enough to the pair to use his shotgun effectively. Sura realized suddenly that she had not seen Braden since the fight started and wondered if he’d survived thus far.
Which was just as well, as a moment later the real gunfight began, sending everyone on the platform scrambling for safety.
Samuel had known that Sura had learned how to shoot and fight while serving aboard the Rig, and though she did not like to talk much of her time aboard prior to Samuel’s arrival, he knew she’d seen her share of violence. Sura was a woman of Grotto, and so she approached life with the same hard pragmatism that everyone else from the corporate society often did.
Samuel, himself, while certainly a man who had struggled and strained against the corporate world and Grotto culture, had that same pragmatic streak. While he had fought in the trenches of distant wars and killed during hostile salvages aboard derelict spacecraft, his estranged wife had been fending off claim jumpers and pirates alongside Captain Dar and the crew of the Rig Halo. He should not have been surprised to learn that she was in the thick of danger, though he was furious that Narek, Dar, and Sura herself had kept that truth from him.