The hatch leading aft was circular and set in the middle of the bridge deck. The three men had positioned themselves around the hatch, weapons aimed at it. There was no place to hide, and nowhere else to go.
He thought he heard…
With a high-pitched bang, the hatch flew into the air, struck the overhead, and fluttered down slowly in the Moon’s weak gravity. A small, dark olive cylinder flew up after it. “Don’t look!” Larouche shouted, turning his head inside his helmet, slamming down his outer sun shield, and squeezing his eyes shut.
The crackling chain of explosions was deafening…though not as bad as they would have been in a one-bar atmosphere. The strobing light was literally blinding, but he’d reacted quickly enough to avoid the effects. When the last explosion faded to a shrill ring, he opened his eyes again and raised his MAB pistol.
Someone below the open hatch thrust the muzzle of an ATAR rifle through, swinging it around to use its optics to scan the bridge. One of the NCA troops brought his weapon up, then pitched back against the pilot’s seat as the ATAR barked. The other Chinese soldier had been slow when the flash-bang had sailed through; he was stumbling about wildly, arms groping, obviously blind.
Larouche stepped forward, planning on firing directly down through the hatch, but a man in a suit reflecting the grays and blues of the ship’s interior compartments exploded up into the compartment. Larouche fired…but too late. The grenade launcher attached beneath the ATAR’s muzzle gave a heavy chuff, and a beehive swarm of fléchettes tore through his lightweight pressure suit, mangling his right arm and part of his chest.
Pain and shock drove him back a step, then the compartment tilted crazily as he dropped to the deck. A second Marine in reactive camo armor came up through the hatch and shot the blinded NCA spec forces trooper with a single 4.5mm ATAR round.
The first Marine took three steps toward Larouche and gently kicked the MAB machine pistol away from his gloved hand. It was, he could see now, a woman. The name stenciled on her suit read GARROWAY.
Garroway. Wasn’t that the name of the Marine who’d overturned the French-UN military op on Mars a couple of years back? He thought that had been a man.
It was getting hard to breathe. His suit no longer held pressure, and he was gasping in the thin air left aboard the Guerrière.
His helmet HUD was still working, though, and showed there were only three minutes and fifty seconds to go. He wondered if he would be unconscious by then. He didn’t want to burn, didn’t want to feel the radiation sleeting through his body at the end. When he’d set the timer going, he’d planned on cracking open his helmet and putting a bullet painlessly through his brain just before the explosion. Now he couldn’t.
Well, a matter-antimatter explosion should be as quick as a bullet. What he wasn’t sure about was how much antimatter would be reacting, and how quickly. He was picturing the blast less as a single, devastating explosion, and more as a rapidly accelerating meltdown.
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Lord, don’t let me suffer.
He waited to die….
PFC Jack Ramsey
UNS Guerrière, Tsiolkovsky Base
0112 hours GMT
“Okay!” Bueller said. “Bridge is clear, you two. Hit it!”
Jack and Bosnivic had been waiting in one of the Guerrière’s passageways for what had seemed like hours. Jack felt completely disoriented. He’d expected the interior of the UN ship to be more or less the same as the Ranger, but the design was totally different, without the US space-craft’s modular design. The passageways were cramped and oddly twisted, the bulkheads and overheads covered by snaking bundles of naked conduits, wires, and piping; the Marines had been ordered to use only their M-440s and fire fléchettes while on board, to avoid puncturing a bulkhead, but it looked like more damage could be done with a beehive round to all of those exposed wires.
The Marines, he noticed, had been switching freely between their ATARs and the shotgunned fléchette bundles, depending on the situation. Heavily armored troops couldn’t be hurt much by fléchettes in any case, so they’d been saving the beehive rounds for targets wearing light pressure suits only. With the rest, they used 4.5mm ATAR rounds and simply made sure they didn’t miss.
As he scrambled up the ladders connecting two more decks, close on Bosnivic’s heels, Jack passed several examples of Marine accuracy in close-quarters combat. How many UNdies were left alive on the ship? He didn’t know, and that wasn’t his concern. The bridge was clear now, and he had a job to do.
Squeezing through the final hatch, he stepped onto the bridge, a dark and claustrophobic place only six meters across and already crowded by Bueller, two Second Platoon Marines, and three UN bodies. Bosnivic was already moving to the computer station, and it didn’t look like there would be room there for two at that console.