Recruit (15 page)

Ryck knew his count would be off, given that he’d been diving through and moving during part of it, but the order came to move out when he hit 82 seconds.  They were all in the ship and could advance.

Cpl Pallas was up and moving almost before the order was completed.  Wan, T-Rex, and Ryck were hot on his tail and they rushed to the hatch in front of them.  They were to breach it, then make for a berthing space on the other side while Smitty’s team moved on to the ship’s passenger galley another 10 meters down.  Their sense of urgency was heightened.  The necessity for speed had been shoved down their throats while they waited.

T-Rex placed a toad on the edge of the hatch where the locking mechanism hid.  The toad was a small,
soft, greenish lump that could stick on just about anything. EVA gauntlets or special employment gloves for planetary use were treated to be able to handle them, but as soon as they touched almost anything else, they stuck to it.  There was a three-second fuse in each toad, the only solid component to the little explosive, that gave the user a very short time to move back.  Toads, or the “E-559 Self-contained Slow Breaching Device,” burned more than they actually exploded and could be used in a vacuum or in breathable air.  They carried their own supply of oxygen with them, suspended in the combustible material, and could burn through almost any material.

“Fire in the hole
!” T-Rex shouted, pushing back.

The toad hissed,
then started its burn, the EVA suit visors instantly compensating for the flare.  The hatch broke free, and T-Rex gave it a kick, sending it open.  Immediately, a burst of fire came back at them, one round, at least, pinging off Ryck’s shoulder.  As it was not an explosive, the toad only opened and did not clear what was on the other side.

EVA suits could take some punishment, but they were not
PICS, nor even bones, although they did give 100% coverage.  A high powered weapon would go right through it, and even a lucky shot from small arms could find an opening.  All four Marines returned fire en masse, not even fully aware of the target, trusting the very nature of a ship’s passageway to focus their rounds. 

“Cease fire,” Sparta ordered after a good 100 or more rounds were sent down the passage. 

Ryck peered ahead.  On the other side, a figure writhed suspended above the deck.  He had an old M-8 alongside of him, but he wasn’t paying it any attention.  Unlike a typical pirate, he was wearing body armor, or at least a hodgepodge of armor plating, and from the looks of it, the old Proskov carapace he had on had protected him from the Marines’ M99s.  The only problem was that he had only the torso carapace and a helmet that Ryck didn’t even recognize.  He had nothing on his arms or legs, and they were torn up pretty bad.  One arm was almost gone, and he kept trying to sort of push it back into place with the other. 

The four Marines rushed up to him with Wan kicking away his M-8.  Ryck automatically started to reach for some ties to secure the man when T-Rex reached forward and pulled up on the man’s helmet.  He looked like a
flick pirate with his unshaven, ratty face.  Central casting could not have done better.   He looked up at T-Rex and raised his good, or at least not as bad arm, in surrender.

T-Rex calmly put the M99 against the man’s forehead and pulled the trigger.

Ryck had almost forgotten.  With SOG, there were no prisoners.  This went against everything they had been taught since T3 back at recruit training.  Ryck didn’t like it.  They were supposed to be the good guys, the ones upholding law and order.  But he understood the orders and would comply if put in that situation.  He just hoped he wouldn’t have to.

The pirate’s body floated back, blood making a string of small globes that
were surprisingly beautiful.  The little red planets kept going for another two meters before suddenly falling and splattering on the deck to pool there. 

With a clear view on where the artificial gravity was working
again, the four Marines twisted around so they could land on their feet as they hit that section.  Ryck took a moment to glance at his telltale.  Smitty’s team and already branched off, and Cpl Julio’s team was in trace, ready to exploit that mission, which was the point of main effort for this section of the ship as the most logical place for captives to be held.  Ryck knew that Sparta would be in pretty constant comms with Sgt PT, SSgt England, and the lieutenant, but too many on the net confused things, so Wan, T-Rex, and he were off the circuit.  The comms AI would kick in if Sparta’s comms went down for any reason, or if the AIs or the command decided they needed to be brought in.  On one hand, Ryck was glad of that.  He could focus on his mission, and focus on the other three Marines in his team.  On the other hand, he wished he knew what else was going on in the assault.  Were the pirates killing the captives?  Were they fighting back?  Not like the lone pirate T-Rex had blown away, but with any semblance of tactics?

With gravity again, the four Marines rushed forward and were at the berthing hatch within moments.  T-Rex reached forward and gently pushed on the entry switch.  To all of their surprise, the door rose with a rush.  It took all of them a split second to realize that they would not have to breach into the space.  Sparta and Wan rushed in first, followed by T-Rex and Ryck.  Sparta and Wan split to each side, getting down low while Ryck and T-Rex went in high.

The space was chaos.  The bunks were all deployed.  This was Berthing 4-19, one of the two male third-class berthing spaces.  The bunks folded up and were retracted into the overhead during waking hours.  This left space for the passengers to relax, watch flicks, read, or whatever.  During sleep hours, all or some of the berths would be lowered, three bunks to a column.  With the bunks deployed, there was only a narrow passage between the bunks, a small common area, and a hatch to the heads.

From the main hatch, the passage was twice as wide as those between the bunks, and it lead right to the common area.  The first thing Ryck saw was the body of a man, hand
s tied behind him and a blindfold over his head, lying on his side.  The blood pooling under his head did not bode well for his condition. 

Ryck jumped when someone, or something, slammed into his legs.  He swung his weapon around, ready to blast, barely holding back when the hands tied behind the man’s back and the blindfold that had fallen to around his neck registered.  The man looked up in resigned despair, a look which slowly shifted as he took Ryck in. 

“Help me!” the man shouted, wiggling out from between the bunks and scooting in back of Ryck. 

Wan was just in front of Ryck, and when the man appeared, he turned back. 
He and Ryck caught each other’s eyes, then hunkered down in unison, looking for the reason the man was asking for help.  In front of them, cursing as he struggled to get through the bunks, was an armed, armored man.  He fell between the bunks with a thud, only one bunk’s width away from the two Marines.  He started forward again, only then seeing that it wasn’t his target in front of him, but two Federation Marines.  With a curse, he struggled to bring up his Freelancer, the muzzle catching on the bunk in front of him.

With him prone like that, not much of what was facing the two Marines was unprotected. 
Except for his neck.  If he’d been standing upright, his neck would have been protected by his armor.  However, on his belly, under his visor, there was a gap.  Ryck and Wan opened up on that gap.  At a meter or so, there was no way they could miss.

The man’s armor was pretty good quality, from the look of it.  It wasn’t Federation-made, but then, pirates didn’t recognize borders.  Being well made, it could stop a dart. 
From the outside, as designed, but also from the inside.  The two Marines each put several darts into the man’s neck where they ricocheted back and forth inside the armor, slicing him to ribbons.  He simply collapsed like a deflating balloon.

“To your right
!” shouted Sparta, the circuit compensators bringing his volume down a few decibels before the two Marines heard it over their helmet speakers.

The command was not very exact, and he hadn’
t addressed it to anyone in particular, but both Wan and Ryck reacted, ignoring the still-tied captive as they rushed forward to a passage, then tried to force their EVA suits through it.  The suits were not particularly bulky, but what they added made pushing through the bunks difficult.  As they swung to the right, they flanked a pirate who was holding a man in front of him, an unrecognizable handgun of some sort to the man’s head.  Like the other two pirates, he also had on armor.  This was out of the ordinary.  From pirate culture, armor was considered coward’s gear.  In the flicks, pirates thought that armor was not manly.  Fiction or not, flicks impacted opinion, and pirates tended to ape what was shown.

Unlike modern Federation
personnel armor, which tended to be flexible plates that were attached to or inserted inside of clothing, all three pirates had outer shells.  That didn’t mean the armor was not effective.  All that meant was that they probably acquired it outside of Federation space.

The pirate to their left had what looked to be newer armor, but either he didn’t have a helmet
or hadn’t a chance to put it on before the four Marines burst the space.  His clean-shaven face and perfectly-groomed blonde hair gave him a look far different from that of the first pirate, an indication that this group was multi-cultural. 

As Ryck and Wan arrived, the man spun first towards them, then back towards Sparta and T-Rex, who had their weapons trained on him.

“Stop, or . . . ” he began.

“Or” what, the Marines could guess, but never know for sure as Wan calmly put a couple of darts over the shoulder of the captive passenger and into the pirate’s handsome blonde head.
  The tiny turn the pirate made back to Sparta and T-Rex gave the lance corporal all the opening he needed.

The captive stood still as the pirate fell back.  He slowly turned
around, hands still tied behind him, and stared at the dead man for a moment before taking a step forward and leveling a powerful kick at the corpse’s head.

“There’s three more,” he said matter-of-factly to the four Marines.

“Wan, did you get anyone else?” Sparta asked.

“One down,” Wan replied.

“Where are the others?” Sparta asked, his external speakers broadcasting his voice into the compartment so any captives could hear.

It was only then that Ryck really noticed the other four bodies on the deck, all with their hands tied,
all executed.  He hadn’t been able to see them from the front hatch, and his attention had been on the pirate when they’d gotten up there.

“Over here!” a voice shouted out from within the deployed bunks
to their left.  “There’s one of them here!”

A
heavy report sounded out from that direction, followed by a cry of pain and sounds of somebody crashing around the bunks.  At the same time, a finger of lightning reached out from between the bunks to their right, splashing across Sparta’s EVA suit.

Someone had a plasma weapon over there, but this was a case where the EVA suits had an advantage over skins and bones.  All the plasma had to do was to touch open skin, and it would essentially short-circuit the body’s nervous system.  It acted like it had a life of its own when it stuck, seeking out the ground through a living body.  It could be devastating to Marines in
just their standard combat armor.  To an EVA suit, though, it had no effect. 

The crewman they’d just saved dropped to the ground, whether kissed by the plasma or not, Ryck couldn’t take the time to check as he and Wan instinctively spun towards the sounds on the other side of the space.  They split on each side of a line of bunks,
then sprinted forward, trusting the other two Marines to take out the plasma pirate.

The berthing space was not really that
big.  Any hangar was much larger.  But with the bunks deployed and blocking the view, it seemed pretty vast.  Ryck tried to keep abreast with Wan, glancing through the bunks to keep even with him.  Blood covered the deck about eight or nine bunks down from the common area.  Ryck took a quick glance at the bottom bunk where a man had dragged himself.  A huge chunk of the man’s side was simply gone.  The man was struggling to breath, and Ryck knew he needed medical care ASAP.

“One friendly WIA
, needs immediate care,” he hit on the medical circuit, knowing the AI would add Ryck’s position. 

That was about all he could do for the man at the moment.  A sudden boom sounded, and the rack between Wan and him simply exploded.  The concussion hit Ryck, actually pushing him aside a few centimeters. 

“What the hump was that?” Wan asked on Ryck’s direct circuit as both Marines hit the deck.

Even though t
he EVA suits were not particularly bulky, they were not made for crawling around under gravity.  The helmet’s design made looking forward while prone difficult, and the power packs, thrusters, and oxi cells added bulk to the back.  Ryck wished they had stopped to get out of the EVA suits and into skins and bones after the breach, but with the time crunch, EVA suits in the attack it was.

Another blast sounded over them, raining bits of bunks down like dirty snow.
  Whatever the pirate had for a weapon, it was pretty big.

“He’s heading for the front hatch!” Wan said.  “We’ve got to stop him before he gets there.”