Incursion Vector

026

The man rolled over like a log in his suit and stiffly tapped his sides while his joints unlocked. “Just one. I've got nothing but life support and radio running through so I can't remote detonate.”

“Wildcard's got grenades and I've got zap caps,” she said. “We're green. Hand it here.”

“Hand it to him,” said Shadow with a groan. “I'd rather someone with two hands play with the high-grade explosives while we're surrounded by alien goo, thanks.”

Grinning and waving her shredded arm at him she said, “This is nothing. It feels better than when I had it snapped in two by our combat instructor.”

“That's because you're dosed,” retorted Shadow.

“And amped.” She passed over the small brace of EMP rounds she kept strapped to her left thigh. Shadow in turn passed them over his shoulder to Spade, who added them to his own collection. “Give me a sec to find an extrication route.”

Standing upright she surveyed the blast zone. Surprisingly enough there was quite a bit of the goo left from the dozen or so vats throughout the bay. The one immediately in front of the door they had opened, the one that had been hit by the most oxygen from the hallway, had pushed the floor downward when it exploded, and the surrounding vats had spilled into it when they had been knocked free in the shockwave. The entire hydroponics bay was now one massive pool of the stuff with a smattering of gray steel vats and suspension cabling jutting out of it almost like a tar pit that had swallowed a herd of metallic-boned animals. Some of the frozen halon hadn't been vented completely and stuck to the surface in irregular white patches, but overall it didn't seem like the rest of it was going to blow up.

“My VTI was reading O2 in here before the explosion,” growled Spade. “Not that I'm complaining about missing the transport to hell, but how did all of this shit not go up?"

"Seriously," agreed Shred. "What. The. Fuck."

“Looks like we're packing back samples of it anyway." Shadow flicked at a piece of steel jutting from the side of his helmet that looked vaguely like a cartoon elf ear, then left it alone and shook his head. “Let the lab coat commandos figure it out later.”

“Aye aye.”

Nim moved along through the wreckage forced up against the wall and located the main recycling hatch for the room. It looked like it had been manually enlarged by hacking a wider, taller hole out of the bulkhead and slapping a plate of steel on hinges to keep it closed when unneeded. Sticking her head through the opening she was relieved to find it was indeed large enough for them to fit through in their suits and hadn't been blocked by anything they couldn't knock free on the way down. It briefly occurred to her that the crew had made the chute larger in order to toss unwanted bodies down into the recycling hold, but standing in a mass grave was quite preferable to having the hydroponics bay become all of theirs.

“Garbage chute, guys.” She waved them towards where she stood. “We can blow our way out to the ship hull through the ventral repository if Minuteman didn't already put a hole in it, then just hike back to our fighters.”

“Going to have to get this bar out of Mantis' shoulder first,” said Shadow. “Spade, Shred, pin him.”

Nim winced in sympathy as Spade and Shred sat on Damien's legs and chest while Shadow planted a boot on his shoulder and ripped the steel bar free. Luckily he was barely lucid until Shadow slapped a pair of large white patches over the holes in his exosuit to reestablish the oxygen seal and the suit reacted by jolting him awake with a dual dose of adrenaline and antibiotics.