“They’ll try to hold us off until the cage is aboard,” said Boss Ulanti as she raised her rifle and snapped off several rounds, her bullets driving the slavers into cover behind several more gravity ballasts.
“They sure picked a great spot to defend,” admitted Gretchen Voss begrudgingly, one of the veteran marines rotated into Tango Platoon after her platoon was liquidated in an engagement several months ago. She held her assault shotgun close to her chest and threaded her way between two of the ballast points.
“Boss we aren’t going to get past these guys in time,” agreed Bianca as she caught up to Samuel. The two of them fired repeated shots at one of the operative to drive him out from his cover.
“The cage is already being clamped in,” observed Abasi as he added his fire to theirs, using their bullets to chase the slaver directly into a crossfire from Boss Ulanti, Joseph, and Holland, leaving the operative a bloody corpse drifting just above the hull.
“Sek, Green, and Hondo, advance to support Voss, we have a better angle of approach than Ulanti,” Samuel ordered quickly as he watched Boss Ulanti, Joseph, and Holland exchange barrages with the remaining slavers. They were unable to advance without being gunned down now that the operatives had solidified their position despite the loss of one of their own. “Kade, let’s clip to a hardpoint so we can get higher and fire from overwatch.”
“If you’re unable to recover the assets, your secondary objective is to ensure that the slavers walk away empty handed,” came the voice of Boss Marsters crackling over the com-beads, the usual flat tone of his voice garbled and made all the more menacing by the ambient interference, “How copy?”
“Good copy,” snapped Boss Ulanti just before being sprayed with small arms fire from the slaver as he sped across the marine line on a diagonal trajectory. Several of the rounds pierced her armor and instantly she was screaming in pain as the vacuum of space pulled against her wounded flesh.
Seconds later Holland slammed into her shuddering body and pinned her hard against a gravity ballast, ignoring the battle raging around him.
“Boss down! Boss down!” shouted Holland as he executed a standard battle drill of broadcasting the alert through the task force channel, “Ulanti down!”
From Samuel’s vantage point he could see the medic hastily slapping adhesive plugs and spraying pressurized sealant over the holes in Boss Ulanti’s armor. He had gone through something similar several months ago after being shot in the leg during a skirmish with armed scavengers aboard a small gaseous mining station. The bandages had stopped the bleeding and the sealant kept hard vacuum from sucking one’s body out through the bullet hole, but the entire process was incredibly painful. Once there was time to be attended to in a med-bay the armor with the sealant usually had to be cut away from the body, then the fused plug and sealant surgically removed, leaving a messy network of scar tissue around the wounded area. It was better than dying, but in those moments of excruciating pain it seemed to him a small improvement.
Samuel tore his gaze from them and returned to the battle at hand. As Gretchen had done, Jada, Spencer, and Abasi were slowly and steadily working their way into the tight network of gravity ballasts.
Samuel and Bianca had tethered themselves with their clips and cables to what looked like some kind of tow mooring, which had given them the opportunity to fire without drifting too far from the fighting. They had to rely heavily on their rifle training. The volume of fire required to keep the two rifle carrying slavers adequately engaged while also suppressing offensive tactics from the slavers in the maze of gravity ballasts emptied the marine’s magazines quickly despite being set on semi-automatic.
“We can’t keep this up, Prybar,” said Bianca as she fired a final round before the gun clicked empty and she reached for what appeared to be the last of her magazines. “No way we can win this, we have to back off or they’ll pick us apart.”
The two slavers in the ballast maze had managed to slip out of sight. As Samuel scanned the battle space for their position, Spencer’s body was suddenly flung backwards. In the blink of an eye the veteran marine was pinned to the wall of a ballast, his body encased in the tightening net projectile.
Samuel re-trained his rifle. He could see the slaver with the trap-caster using his thrusters to slide to the far right, as if he intended to skirt the edge of the maze and flee in a wide circle back to the cutter.
As that one fled, the other gunner emerged from a blind corner on the opposite side of the ballast and emptied one of his extended magazines into Spencer’s body. At point blank range the small arms fire tore the veteran marine’s body to pieces.
In less than two seconds one of Samuel’s closest friends and comrades, a veteran marine of over six years, was reduced to rapidly freezing chunks of meat.
Samuel’s lungs seized up, and he floated in a state of mental and emotional shock. Spencer Green, brother to Paul Green, uncle to Heather and Vanessa Green, who had been covering the life-bond payments of his brother so that Paul could use the savings to one day buy a professional education license for whichever of the girls could pass the aptitude exams, was dead. Perhaps his death meant that both girls would have the opportunity, Samuel couldn’t stop himself thinking as his grip on his rifle loosened and he watched the cloud of bright red particles expand outwards from what used to be his friend.
“Voss, hostile on your right, two points up, we’re going to push him towards you,” said Bianca from her position next to Samuel as she looked down her sights and began firing at the fleeing slaver with the trap-caster.
“Got him,” Gretchen’s replied. The deep thudding reverberations of the marine’s assault shotgun snapped Samuel out of his shock. He gasped with a surge of adrenaline as he turned to see that the shotgun had turned the slaver operative into an equally gory cloud of pieces.
“Boss,” said Bianca as she turned to Samuel. When he did not respond, she pulled on the cable he was clipped to and they bounced into each other as the remaining marines exchanged fire with the operatives in the background. “Samuel, we have to end this.”
Samuel shook his head and snapped himself back into focus, finding himself in Bianca’s concerned expression. His grip on his rifle tightened with renewed awareness.
“Liquidate the assets,” said Samuel in a grim tone, and he turned to raise his rifle to his shoulder. “Kade, target the plexi-glass, and ignore the slavers.”
The two marines took careful aim, ignoring the firefight raging between the advancing marines in the ballast maze and the remaining slavers. Samuel breathed deeply as he looked down his sights at the orange glass of the oxygen cage. It was finally secure, and the slavers looked as if they were about to hoist it up into the belly of the cutter.
He squeezed the trigger once, twice, then three times and watched as each successive round caused the glass to splinter and crack more. Bianca added her fire to his and the oxygen cage suddenly burst apart and depressurized, venting bodies and atmosphere into hard vacuum. Samuel knew the captives would freeze and asphyxiate within seconds in the harsh void of space. The slavers, their booty gone, were already rushing to make their getaway.
Without anything of value to fight over, both the marines and slavers quickly disengaged and backed away from their enemy.
The cutter retracted its moorings and fired port thrusters to liftoff. Within minutes it was just another spec of light in the vast starscape of space.