Semper Mars(109)
Fuentes had all of this in mind as she suited up once more and passed through the McCutcheon’s airlock into space. Seven Marines were on station outside the ISS at all times now, and care was taken to change the guard at staggered intervals, to avoid providing an attractive target for the UN troops penned up inside.
“Okay, Carlotto,” she said, jetting gently across the intervening emptiness toward the station. “Time for you to go take a load off.”
“Yessir,” Private Carlotto replied. “Man, it stinks inside this armor, y’know?”
“It’s getting about that bad on the McCutcheon,” she said. “Just think about hot showers when we get back to Earth.”
“What’re you tryin’ to do, L-T?” Gunnery Sergeant Walsh told her. “Ruin morale? I’ve been doing nothing for the past three hours but float here thinking of hot showers.”
“That’s what we’re fighting for, Gunny,” she replied. “Hot showers and all the soap we want.”
Walsh rose on silent pulses of his MMU jets, his armor changing swiftly from ink black to mottled silver and blue as he cleared the station’s shadow and began picking up some of the light reflecting off the Earth and the lit portions of the station. With Walsh at her side, Fuentes let herself drift slowly along the length of the ISS, her boots less than two meters from the uneven white surface. The central part of the ISS was a jumble of lab modules, some showing various flags of participating countries, including Japan, France, and Russia. The largest structures were converted Shuttle II external tanks, most of which were currently being used for storage of either consumables or rocket fuel or water hauled up from Earth. The end facing Earth included the ISS bridge, a turretlike structure with several windows set just above the main docking collar, where a European Hermes remained docked to the station. The lights inside had been shut down, and there was little to be seen through the windows.
Fuentes continued drifting along the station’s length, past the vast, black expanse of the solar panels, where Marines had successfully cut the power cables and robbed the ISS of its main source of energy. The far end of the ISS, away from the Earth, was the original Alfa module. There were five separate airlocks on the station besides the one currently occupied by the European shuttle, each of them guarded by at least one Marine. Three of those five locks were located on the Alfa complex, however, and if UN troops were going to attempt a sortie, that was a good spot to try it from. The big trouble in attacking either into or out of the ISS was the bottlenecks imposed by the airlocks. If only a couple of troops at a time could pass through them, it would be simple for the other side to pick them off one at a time.
She was floating above the Alfa complex when something struck the side of her armor.
At first, she couldn’t see what was happening. Then she realized with a start that part of the Alfa assembly was drifting away from the rest.
No, it wasn’t a part of Alfa, not quite. A lifeboat, one of the original winged pods intended as escape capsules in case of orbital disaster, had been nestled against the last module in line. Now, however, the lifeboat was drifting clear; the fragment that had struck Fuentes’s armor was a bit of metal or paint thrown clear by the silent detonation of a small explosive charge of some kind. And in the next instant, she knew what was happening.
“Heads up, Marines!” she called over the general frequency. “The bad guys are coming out, Alfa-end!”
“Minsky! Ortega!” Walsh added. “Everybody! Get your asses down here! They’ve blown the lifeboat clear and are using the whole damned Alfa complex as a giant lock!”
As he spoke, the first blue-helmeted troopers drifted into view, rising out of the widening gap between Alfa and the escape pod. Hell, they must have depressurized half of Alfa, crowded as many troops inside as they could, then blown emergency release charges on the lifeboat to open up. There could be a lot of soldiers coming out in one big mob.
Fuentes braced her ATAR, acquired a target, and fired. She missed, and a slight imprecision in her aim set her tumbling to the left. Reaching out, she managed to snag a guy wire bracing part of the keel structure, arrest her tumble, and anchor herself against a keel strut. With her legs gripping the strut, she was able to raise the ATAR in both hands without worrying about balance, drag the crosshairs on her HUD’s video inset across an oncoming armored figure, and squeeze the trigger.
The effect was satisfactorily gory, with the UN trooper’s helmet torn open and a pink haze of freezing blood and air spilling into nearby space, as the man’s body spun in the opposite direction. A second UN soldier came in behind the first, firing as he moved and doing a pretty good job of keeping the weapon’s butt plate squarely on his center of mass. Fuentes felt the shock as bullets struck the strut she was clinging to, but she acquired target and returned fire without flinching; there was no place to duck in this alien battleground, no foxholes, no protective cover.