My thoughts threatened to stray to the lifeless body of one Private First Class James Casey, but I pulled my mind back to more important matters. I had to focus on the fight.

  Our respective fireteams stepped warily into the compartment and we kept the muzzles of our guns in a high ready position. I didn’t see anyone though, so after a moment I relaxed marginally when nothing exploded and no one took a shot at me. Soon after, I walked over to Juarez.

  “What the hell? That’s it? Six guys? And they pushed you out?” I scoffed. I noticed an acrid smell in the air, like burnt meat.

  I sealed my suit to keep the smell out and waved Carver over to me, trying to keep my focus squarely on the present.

  “And the three back in the corridor. There were a lot more of them before!” Juarez said, frustrated.

  I looked around, but I only saw six armoured corpses, one of which I’d personally perforated. “So they took the bodies then?”

  “Must have.” Juarez affirmed, his voice grim, but also uncertain.

  I looked at the bodies arrayed in a macabre collection on the deck. Most of them I recognised when I pinged them for their implanted identification but there were two that didn’t return an ID.

  It almost would've been better if I couldn't have identified any of them.

  "Poor bastards." I muttered, the names of my friends and comrades popping up. It tore at my heart even more when I noticed one of the deceased Marines was the Marine who'd welcomed me to the ship. We'd played card a few times since. My mind threatened to spiral because of that. He'd tried to kill me. Why? What could turn brother against brother? I pushed the thoughts away with a firm and conscious effort, shelving the mess for a later time.

  I turned to Carver who was trying to connect to a torn up Engineering console.

  “See if you can get something out of these two. I can’t ID them.” I pointed at each of the armoured corpses in turn.

  “ID? I’m surprised I can even recognise their armour. What the hell happened to them? They’re burnt to a crisp inside. ” Carver stepped back a bit, clearly disgusted.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. Just try, okay?” My eyes lingered on the broken faceplate of one of the fallen.

  I would’ve liked to call it a man, but there could’ve been a woman or a dancing monkey in there for all I knew, such was the extent of the damage.

  “There were definitely more than six hostiles.” Juarez insisted again, muttering. His smoldering eyes flicking between me and the gaping hole in another armoured corpse.

  “So, let me guess, seven?” Carver asked with a sarcastic bite as he knelt down and popped open his portable computer. He dragged the body unceremoniously over to a battered looking ship console.

  I was about to ask him what the hell he was doing, but figured I’d just get an earful of technobabble if I did.

  Carver ripped a damaged panel off one of the consoles as he crouched down next to it, before giving the rest of the room around him an appraising look. Numerous waist-high workstations and armour plated walls were scorched, wrecked or twisted into debris. That there was even one console left intact and usable was a surprise to me, but it didn't surprise me that Carver had been able to find it in three seconds flat.

  “Here’s an idea,” Carver said over his shoulder, “maybe we should stop the bad guys from taking over our most important areas. That would be really smart.” Carver shook his head in disgust and plugged in a data cable to the console in front of him, bitching about something under his breath.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Juarez’ eyes narrowed as he took an angry step towards the oblivious technician. I didn’t even see her move, but in an instant Larsen was in front of Juarez, one arm barring his path to Carver.

  “Leave it. Now is not the time.” A notable edge to Larsen’s voice gave Juarez pause and I could see one of her hands had strayed to her belt where a very sharp knife was sheathed. The thought made me smile. Carver might be an annoying asshole sometimes, no, the king of annoying assholes, but my team was willing to back him up.

  “Fine.” Juarez got out. I watched as he stalked away to check on his surviving team members then began flicking through damage reports, environmental readouts and logs to find out what the hell had happened down here. I wasn’t a tech, but I could read a log file and use a computer.

  “Larsen, Chen, perimeter.”

  They nodded and I knelt down across from Carver by a destroyed console as he worked.

  “Jammers for Engineering are down. It was easy to space the compartments they were in and then disable them remotely.” Carver boasted.

  “Space them?” I asked, shooting him an outraged look, which of course was entirely lost on him because of our armour. “Did you just vent the compartments to space? What if they had people in them? Did you even check?”

  “Uh, yes?” Carver turned his head to me, pausing from his poking around in the console’s innards. I couldn’t see his face, but reading a man in armour was a skill that most soldiers picked up after a while.

  “They weren’t occupied. I checked.” He said, sounding slightly offended.

  I shook my head. I don’t know if I’d have reported him after the current crisis or finally given in to the urge to shoot him, but since he hadn’t spaced anyone, I was spared that weighty decision for now.

  “Good. I’d hate to explain how I shot you because you spaced a dozen friendlies during my report, just to take out a few jammers. Keep working.” I walked off to join the perimeter defense, which really just amounted to holding a few hatchways and making sure no one came through them.

  Carver was about to respond, his name lit up on my HUD, but a priority message stopped us dead in our tracks and the edges of my visor morphed into a thin collection of red and white diagonal stripes.

  An automated message spooled out along the top of my visor. It was something I hadn’t seen since training or my review of a field manual months ago. The words that wrote themselves into existence chilled me to my core.

  Flash traffic. Radiological threat detected. Location unknown, yield unknown, suspected dirty bomb aboard. All units are to hereby exit the ship immediately.

  I didn’t hear much more after that as I hunkered down behind a ruined console, thinking at lightning speed about our next move.

  After a tense few seconds in which I desperately wracked my brain for options, I snapped back to reality with a simple but effective plan. “We’re leaving. Right now! Carver, don’t worry about that, get us an escape pod!”

  I put my focus on the hatch we’d come through. Nestling my rifle on top of some uneven debris, the chunks of ripped and scored metal provided an imperfect mount for my weapon. If we’d received that message, there was a good chance the enemy had too. They seemed to be tapped into the ship and there was no telling what they could do, or see.

  “What the fuck? Does that mean what I think it does? There’s a bomb onboard?” Chen began cursing in what I assumed was Korean, but I quickly tuned him out as he turned to mount his weapon on a console beside me.

  “Sure does, big guy. I’ll help prep the pod. Watch our six.” Larsen gave him a quick pat on the shoulder, before bolting for an escape pod’s hexagonal hatchway. I looked around and realised Carver was already inside the pod.

  You wouldn’t think it would take more than a few seconds to launch an escape pod and normally you’d be right, but I didn’t trust the things as far as I could throw them. Software updates, mechanical maintenance, these sorts of things just weren’t a priority when a ship had over a thousand crew and only a fraction of them were qualified engineers. The Mars shipyards in orbit back home did do an inspection before the Spear’s maiden voyage as per regulation, but that didn’t reassure me one bit.

  It wouldn’t be the first time improperly done maintenance got someone killed. That was all assuming the people we’d just filled full of holes hadn’t tampered with the pods, too. If we’d climbed into a pod and launched only to find out it had some kind of major defect, well, it would be a shitty way to die. Those were all points that had me directing Carver to check the pod’s systems and tear into it to find out if it was going to kill us because of a faulty launch thruster or something.

  I sought out Juarez, silently watching him for a moment with one eye on possible points of enemy entry. “Are you good?” I asked.

  Juarez was the angry type when he suffered losses, it seemed, not that most people weren’t angry when those under their command were killed, it just seemed Juarez took it harder than most. I hadn’t seen that side of him on the way out here, but we hadn’t had anyone taking out Marines until now.

  I noticed the tight hold he had on his rifle, the grip on his rifle was slightly deformed as he struggled to keep a lid on things. He would probably be okay, but I’d keep an eye on him, just in case. An out of control Marine snapping in the middle of combat was something I didn't need right now.