Samuel kicked off and his body sailed upwards through the chute, but within just a few meters he slammed into the side of the chute, causing Jada to crash into his feet.
“Come on, Prybar, you know this whole frigate is going left spinward now that it’s dead and drifting, didn’t you pick up on that while we were going through the blast craters?” chastised Jada as she disentangled herself from Samuel above her and Bianca below her. “Angle left and you’ll sail all the way to the top without hitting the sides, nice and easy, and stay alert for the end of the chute.”
Samuel chose not to respond, partly out of embarrassment for holding up the whole squad, partly out of a fondness for her use of his nickname. Only the veterans of Tango Platoon dared called him Prybar, and even then only at the most opportune moments. Samuel had been Boss Hyst for some time now, and there were plenty of marines in Tango Platoon and many more in the Baen task force who knew him only as Boss. The name reminded him of what seemed in that moment to be a simpler time, when the only life he was responsible for was his own, and before he had really learned just how complicated the world could be, even for a simple marine. The Reaper adjusted his body and kicked off again, this time leaning spinward, and the scratch squad flew upwards through the darkened tunnel towards the hull.
They could all hear the reports over the comm of Squad Ulanti’s engagement with the slavers, and it sounded like Boss Ulanti had managed to prevent the enemy from escaping the engine section by engaging their rearguard. She had reported seeing what she believed might be the slaver’s ship, a converted Praxis Mundi mid-range cutter, maneuvering on the other side of the frigate.
Samuel estimated that if his squad breached the hull and cut to the right across the outside of the ship then his group would come down on top of any reinforcements that might be coming from the slaver ship. He agreed with Boss Marster’s roster choice, as the grizzled platoon leader had kept two high rated welders, Marcus and Tillman, and the two marines with the most effective crowd-control weapons, Ben and Harold. This left Samuel with three solid assault marines and Holland as a capable medic in case of any casualties for Hyst’s or Ulanti’s squads. There would be casualties, of that Samuel was certain.
For all of their capabilities, skill, training, and combat experience, the Reapers were still just salvage marines. The Reapers had been able to outmaneuver and outgun the naval security staff in a matter of seconds. In such moments Samuel almost forgot how low on the military measuring stick he and his fellow Reapers were compared to the elite mercenaries of the Merchants Militant or just below them in the hierarchy, the hereditary warriors of Grotto high society. In the vastness of necrospace it was easy to forget just how broad the spectrum ran between predator and scavenger. Reapers were the apex scavengers of the universe, but the slavers, especially if the Tasca rumors held any truth, were likely their equal, and it would be a real fight this time. As Samuel saw the end of the chute looming he found himself hoping that the force of natural selection would be on the side of Grotto today.
Samuel reached out and let his hands and feet begin dragging on the walls of the chute so that by the time he was less than a foot from the end of the chute his momentum had been nullified. As soon as his ascent stopped, Samuel slipped his hand welder from its belt loop and began cutting.
As Samuel worked on creating an exit Jada reached out to grasp the clip and thin cable spooled around Samuel’s belt. She clipped his cable to her belt, then passed the clip leading to her own spool of cable back to Bianca, who attached herself and then handed her own down the line. Holland was last in line; having spot welded the chute entrance hatch so that when Samuel blew the exit there would only be minimal atmosphere to clear. Had the hatch not been closed, much of the aft section atmosphere would have vented into space, carrying the marines with it into the void. As it was, everyone was tethered to one another and to several points on the chute itself. Both Holland and Claudius had looped their cables through the static panel handles nearby that presumably led into other chambers of the ship.
Finally Samuel’s torch hit hard vacuum and everyone on the line felt the sudden pull upwards. Since there was only a few inches of vacuum through which the atmosphere could vent, for a short time it created a swirling tempest that made it difficult for Samuel to finish cutting the exit. By the time Samuel had finished there was just enough atmosphere left to carry the already freezing steel chunk of hull off into space.
Samuel carefully raised himself out of the chute and scanned the area. At first he was somewhat disoriented, because they were on a hull opposite of where he’d begun the mission. In just those few minutes of threading his way through the blast craters the marine had gotten used to having the bright green light of the planet on the other side of him. The light reflecting outwards from the planet’s pale swirling surface bathed this side of the hull in an off-white and green radiance, creating patches of deep shadow where various arrays or bent blast craters jutted upwards from the hull. Samuel turned around when he realized that he was looking up the ship towards the prow. When he looked aft he could see muzzle flashes dotting the landscape of the aft outer hull.
“Everyone detach your mooring cables, there’s no way we’ll be able to move as a squad out here, too many surface obstacles,” Samuel said to the group inside the shoot just as an unidentified piece of debris narrowly missed the marine and sheared off a piece of the hull as it careened onwards in its maddening flight. “Right, also we won’t have much other than luck keeping us from being hit with debris from the void fight, so stay in motion, but hug whatever hard cover you can find.”
The marines quickly unhooked themselves and prepped their weapons, then one after the other they exited the chute. Samuel kicked off once Jada was out of the shoot, though the veteran marine was fast on the jump and was able to pass the squad leader quickly. Samuel watched Jada streak past him and cursed under his breath. Jada Sek was as hard a veteran as anyone, and she had endured whatever hell had been waiting for her and Boss Ulanti when the stalkers had captured them, but sometimes she was courageous to the point of reckless bravado.
While Samuel had kept his launch a modest affair, plotting his ideal trajectory before he pushed off, so that he could sail over the surface of the hull at a good speed but slow enough that he could make adjustments if there was an obstacle, Jada had put everything into her kickoff and sped well ahead of Samuel, ever further from the other three marines behind the squad leader.
Samuel did his best to push from his mind the thought of what he and his squad were actually doing. They had no tethers and no in-suit thrusters, so if they were pulled or pushed away from the gravitational pull of the frigate they would be drifting in the void with little hope of rescue. If one of them was cast away from the ship, that person’s only chance of survival would be to fire their rifle in the opposite direction of where they wanted to go and hope they were able to aim their bodies well and had enough ammunition to try again if they missed the first time.
It was in moments like this, streaking across the hull of a dead frigate in the middle of a void battle debris storm toward a zero gravity firefight against an unknown enemy, that Samuel was in awe of his chosen life. He could have stayed at the factory, worked his life away and raised his family in the crushing bosom of Grotto society.
His children would experience the same compulsory education and job assignment, and like him, their lives would be planned out by the masters of Grotto, with little regard for what they might dream of becoming or want to do with their lives. There was, however, a kind of comfort in that sort of life bondage. Samuel knew many more citizens who accepted that life without complaint than he did those like himself or Ben Takeda, who wanted something more. Even many of his fellow marines approached the Reaper Corps like it was just another job assignment, and did not attach the kind of meaning to it that Samuel did. For most marines, being a Reaper was not a way out of Grotto, but more a way of finding their place in Grotto.