Kuiper Squad - Chapter 2
Flo woke to an alarm that wasn't the one she'd been told to expect.
Not the soft double-chime of burn's-end, not the flat administrative voice reading out arrival coordinates. This was a klaxon, ragged and insistent, the kind of sound designed by someone who understood that human bodies needed to be frightened before they'd move fast enough to survive.
Battle stations. Battle stations. All personnel to combat readiness.
Her body was still catching up to her mind, the sedative's tail end dragging at her like wet cloth, her limbs heavy in a way that had nothing to do with gravity, because there wasn't much gravity to speak of. Not zero-g exactly. Something in between, a queasy half-weight that told her the ship was maneuvering, hard, and whatever artificial pull she felt was leftover momentum fighting itself.
She forced her eyes the rest of the way open.
Bunk five. Fox. Already awake, already unstrapped, floating half out of his restraint with the too-wide eyes of someone whose body had woken up faster than his understanding of why.
Bunk six. Sasha, blinking hard, jaw already setting into the shape Flo had seen once before, the discipline clicking down over the fear like a visor.
The rest were still out. Still soft-faced, drugged, unaware that the world had changed while they slept.
The wake-up counteragent hit her system all at once, she felt it the way you feel a light switch, not a dimmer, sensation flooding back into her fingers and jaw and the base of her skull in a rush that was almost worse than the sedative had been. Her heart rate spiked before her mind had even finished the thought this is bad.
The deck groaned. A long, low sound, metal complaining under a stress it hadn't been built for. Somewhere below them, below being a relative term now, with gravity behaving like a suggestion, something detonated, distant and muffled, and the whole room shivered in sympathy.
The bunk compartments along the wall, the ones she'd assumed were storage and hadn't thought twice about, split open with a hiss of released pressure, and combat suits unfolded out of them like something being born.
"Up," Flo said. Not loud. Didn't need to be, not with that klaxon doing the work for her. "Everybody up, now."
Cade was moving before she finished the word, unbuckling with the same unhurried competence he'd shown boarding, except now there was an edge under it, something coiled. Dee came up fighting her restraints, swearing under her breath, hands already reaching for the suit segments floating free of bunk three's open panel.
Sawyer didn't move at all.
Flo caught it out of the corner of her eye, the widest of them, the one who'd made a joke about needing something dramatic, now frozen against his restraints with his mouth slightly open and his eyes fixed on nothing, the particular stillness of a nervous system that had simply declined to process what was happening. She didn't have time for him yet. Filed it. Moved to the one she knew would be worse.
Jackson was awake, groggy, blinking against the residual fog of the stun and the counteragent both, and when his eyes found Flo across the shaking room they went from confused to furious in about half a second, some old animal memory catching up with the fact of what had put him under.
She didn't give him room to start anything.
"Suit," she said, already unlatching his restraint with one hand, already shoving a torso segment toward him with the other. "Now. Talk later."
He flinched away from her hands like her touch was the insult, not the stun had been. "Get off me."
"Suit yourself, then." She let go. Meant it two ways and didn't have time to enjoy either.
The ship bucked, a hard, sideways lurch that had nothing gentle about it, the kind of motion that meant something outside had hit them and meant something big. Fox lost his grip on his half-fastened boot and drifted into the wall with a grunt. Sasha caught herself on the bunk frame, breathing through her teeth, hands moving anyway, methodical, one clasp at a time, refusing to let the shaking room dictate the pace of her hands even as it dictated everything else.
"Cade." Flo's voice cut through the klaxon and the groaning hull and Dee's continued cursing. "Sawyer."
Cade was already there. He didn't ask, didn't waste breath on it, just got a shoulder under Sawyer's arm and hauled, one clean motion, and started fitting the suit pieces onto him like a man dressing a mannequin, murmuring something low and steady the whole time that Flo couldn't hear over the noise but could see working, a little, in the way Sawyer's eyes started to track again instead of staring through the wall.
"With me, Sawyer," Cade said, louder now. "Just your arms. Just the arms first."
Sawyer's hands came up, shaking hard, and found the sleeve.
Good enough. Flo turned away, trusting Cade with it, and found Dee already half into her own suit and reaching to help Sasha with a clasp Sasha's shaking fingers had missed twice.
"I got it," Dee said, short, not unkind, and Sasha let her, jaw tight, eyes wet at the corners but not spilling.
Fox had righted himself and was working through his own suit with the deliberate, methodical focus of someone treating panic as a math problem, this piece, then this piece, in this order, because that's what the drill said. Flo watched him get it right the second time and moved on.
That left Jackson.
He'd gotten the suit half on, badly, the torso segment crooked, and when she glanced back he was fighting the boot seal with the single-minded fury of a man who would rather lose a fight with his own equipment than accept a hand from anyone in the room. His jaw was locked. His eyes were too bright, too wide, the fear under the anger showing now that the anger had nowhere else to go.
She didn't offer again. Some men needed to be handled. Some men needed to be left alone long enough to handle themselves, and pushing twice only cost you the thing you were trying to build. She logged which kind he was and moved on, because the room was shaking again, harder, and her HUD had just lit up with a route.
"Suits sealed, visors down, everyone on me," Flo said. "We're not waiting for muster. New orders; direct to the aft hangar. Move."
The corridor outside Bay 4-C was not the corridor they'd boarded through.
It had been narrow before, awkward with mining-vessel proportions never meant for foot traffic. Now it was worse, a long section of paneling had come free from one wall and hung at an angle, sparking intermittently, and the air had a burnt, electrical smell under the recycled staleness, something wrong and chemical. A body drifted past them at the first junction, a crewman in a maintenance jumpsuit, and Flo didn't let herself look long enough to see whether he was breathing. There was nothing she could do for him that wouldn't cost her seven people she could still save.
"Stay tight," she said, into the suit comms, her own voice sounding strange and close in her ears. "Follow the blue line. Don't stop for anything that isn't me stopping."
The ship shook again, not the sharp lurch of before but a longer, rolling shudder, the sound of something enormous being struck and absorbing it, groaning the whole length of its hull in complaint. Scotty's Dilemma had been built to survive rock impacts and pressure differentials, not weapons fire, but Flo found herself grateful, in a distant clinical way, for however much of that old mining armor was still doing its job.
They pushed through a junction where three other squads were converging, a crush of suited bodies all trying to move through a space built for one file at a time, shouts overlapping, someone's suit comms bleeding static into the general channel. Flo put a hand on Fox's shoulder and steered him bodily around a knot of panicking recruits rather than let him get swept into it, and felt him go rigid under her palm, then loosen, following her lead instead of the crowd's.
A hatch ahead of them had buckled inward, twisted enough that it left only a gap at one corner, and Flo went through first, checking the space beyond before waving the others through one at a time. Cade came last through that one, having stayed at the rear the whole way, a hand on Sawyer's back the entire time, not quite pushing, just present, a reminder that he was there.
"Vitals," Cade said quietly in a private channel to Flo. "Sawyer's spiking. Heart rate's up around one-eighty. He's not gonna last if we hit real contact."
"Keep him moving," Flo said. "That's the job right now. Not fixing him. Moving him."
"Copy."
Another explosion somewhere forward of them, close enough that the deck actually jumped beneath their boots, an honest-to-god physical impact rather than just sound, and this time the lights along the corridor flickered and half of them didn't come back. Emergency strips kicked in low and red instead, painting everyone's suits the color of old blood.
Dee's voice cut through the comm, tight. "Sarge, we got people back there not moving."
"I see them." She did. Two crewmembers slumped against a bulkhead, unmoving, and she made herself keep her HUD's blue line as the only thing that mattered, made herself walk past them the way she'd walked past the vomiting recruits during boarding, because that had been easy and this was not, this had actual stakes stitched into every meter of not stopping. "Nothing we can do. Keep moving."
She heard Sasha's breath hitch over the comm, sharp, once, and then steady again. Discipline, doing its job.
Jackson had fallen back, several meters behind the main cluster, moving fast enough to keep pace but with a stiffness to his gait that Flo recognized as a man refusing to let his fear slow him down even while it was very clearly trying to. He didn't ask for help going through the buckled hatch. He didn't ask for anything. He just kept coming, silent, furious at the ship and the war and possibly at himself, and Flo let him have that, because forward was forward regardless of the expression on a man's face while he did it.
The blue line took a sharp turn, dropped them down what had once been a maintenance shaft and was now the only clear route left, and dumped them out into a wider space that hummed with a different, more organized kind of noise, the aft hangar, vast and echoing, its far wall open to a starfield gone strange and bright with weapons fire that had no business existing in a solar system that had been quiet for three centuries.
"All squads, dropship assignment override," the general channel crackled, a voice stretched thin with its own fear. "Skip muster. Board nearest available craft. Direct orders, immediate departure, this is not a drill…"
The word drill dissolved into static, and somewhere on the other side of the hangar a support strut sheared loose and drifted, slow and enormous, trailing sparks.
"That's us," Flo said, pointing. "That one. Move, move, move."
The dropship's interior was smaller than the squad bay had been, if that was possible — two long benches facing each other, restraint harnesses hanging loose and waiting, no windows except a single narrow strip of reinforced viewport up near the cockpit divider. Another squad was already strapping in on the far side when Flo's people crowded through the hatch, seven strangers in identical suits, faces Flo didn't have time to learn.
"Two squads, one bird," Dee muttered, catching the arrangement immediately, dropping into a harness with quick, sure hands. "That's not… that's not standard."
"Nothing about tonight is standard," Flo said. "Strap in."
She did a fast visual sweep as her own squad found seats, Cade guiding Sawyer down and cinching his harness for him when the younger man's hands wouldn't cooperate, Fox already secured and staring straight ahead with the flat concentration of someone doing very complicated math to avoid doing anything else, Sasha beside him with her lips moving again, silent, counting or praying, Dee already leaning forward toward the cockpit divider like she wanted to be closer to whatever was about to happen up there, and Jackson, last through the hatch, dropping into the seat nearest the exit like he wanted to keep an option open that didn't exist anymore.
The hatch sealed. The hangar noise cut off, replaced by a tighter, more claustrophobic hum, and through the narrow viewport strip Flo caught a wedge of starfield and, cutting across it, a streak of light too fast and too straight to be anything natural.
"This is Halvorsen, I'm your pilot, hang on." The voice through the cockpit comm was young, younger than it had any right to be given what it was about to do, and already fraying at the edges. "Disengaging from dock, we are go, we are go!"
The dropship kicked free of the larger ship with a shove Flo felt in her spine, and then they were out, into open space, into the middle of a fight that had no clean lines to it at all, light everywhere, some of it weapons fire and some of it debris catching the light of something burning, and Scotty's Dilemma falling away behind them scarred and venting atmosphere from a dozen wounds Flo hadn't seen from the inside.
"Oh god, oh god, they're… they're taking Delta-Nine, they're just…" Halvorsen's voice again, no longer talking to them at all, talking to himself, watching something on his own display that the squad in the back couldn't see. "That's the third one, that's three dropships, I can't…"
"Hey." Dee had unclipped enough to lean toward the cockpit divider, voice hard, cutting through his spiral like a slap. "Hey! Pilot. Listen to me."
"I'm flying, I'm…"
"You're letting the AI fly and it's flying you into a shooting gallery. Manual override and fly that damn bird."
"I'm not rated for manual combat maneuvers, I'm rated for…"
"I don't care what you're rated for," Dee said, and there was something in her voice now that Flo recognized, some old fury she'd probably never gotten to use in a cockpit of her own, aimed now at exactly the right target. "The AI flies predictable lines. That's what's getting people killed out there. You take manual, you fly ugly, you fly wrong, and we might actually live. Do it."
A beat of silence, filled with the whine of something passing close enough outside to rattle the hull.
"Manual override… engaged!"
The dropship's motion changed immediately, violently, no longer the smooth arcs of computer-plotted evasion but something rawer, gut-punch turns that threw everyone sideways against their harnesses, Sawyer making a small strangled sound, Foxgripping his own restraints.
"New orders, new orders," Halvorsen's voice cracked through again, higher now, "command says… objective's the station, that's the… that's the whole objective, land and engage, land and… Christ, that's insane, that's a station, we don't know anything about…"
Flo's HUD confirmed it a half-second later, orders scrolling green across the corner of her vision, stark and absurd in their simplicity: LAND. ENGAGE. HOLD.
Through the narrow viewport, past Halvorsen's shoulder, something had begun to fill the black that hadn't been there a moment ago, vast, dark, wrong-angled in a way that made Flo's eyes want to slide off it rather than resolve it, lit at odd intervals by lights that were not friendly and not designed for human eyes to read as anything but hostile.
The alien station.
They were supposed to land on that.
"That's the plan," Flo said, out loud, mostly to herself, mostly to make it real by saying it. "Land and attack."
"That's not a plan," Fox said, quiet, precise, terrified and still doing math even now. "That's a… that's just a direction with a verb attached."
"It's the plan we've got."
The dropship rolled hard to starboard, throwing them all against their harnesses again, and through the viewport Flo caught the far side of the craft, the section where the other squad sat, strangers whose names she'd never learned, go suddenly, silently bright.
The light didn't look like an explosion. It looked cleaner than that, more deliberate, a single searing line that swept through the hull at an angle and simply removed everything it touched.
The ship didn't break apart. It didn't need to. Where the other squad had been sitting there was, for one suspended half-second, a wall of white heat, and then there was hard vacuum sealed off by emergency bulkheads that slammed down a heartbeat too late to matter, and where seven people had been strapped into their harnesses there were, in the after-image burned into Flo's vision, only a few small dark shapes still fixed to what remained of the benches.
Nobody screamed. There wasn't time to scream. The whole thing had taken less time than a breath.
Sasha made a sound like she'd been hit. Sawyer's harness rattled with how hard he was shaking. Cade had gone very still, very quiet, his hand finding Sawyer's shoulder again without seeming to decide to do it.
Flo didn't say anything. There was nothing to say that would be true and useful at the same time, and she'd learned a long time ago that when you couldn't manage both, you said nothing at all.
"We're hit, we're hit, emergency bulkheads holding, I'm taking us in, I'm taking us in NOW!"
The station filled the entire viewport.
The landing was not a landing. It was closer to a controlled version of smashing into the ground, a long, grinding, shrieking impact that Flo felt through every point where her body touched the harness, a deceleration so violent it turned her vision white at the edges and drove the breath out of her lungs in a single involuntary grunt. Metal screamed against metal, or against something that wasn't quite metal, the dropship's hull carving a long furrow through whatever the alien station's surface was made of, throwing up a spray of debris that hammered against the outer plating like hail.
It went on longer than it should have been possible for anything to survive.
Then it stopped.
Silence, total and sudden, the kind that came after violence rather than before it. Flo's ears rang. Her whole body ached in the specific, deep way that meant bruising rather than breaking, and she took a slow inventory, fingers, toes, spine, the working checklist she'd drilled into herself years ago for exactly this kind of moment, and found, distantly, gratefully, that everything answered.
"Sound off," she said, and her voice came out rougher than she meant it to. "Sound off, now."
"Fox, okay." Thin, shaky, but there.
"Sasha. I'm… I'm okay."
"Dee, I'm good, I'm good."
Cade's deep voice, steady even now: "Cade, fine. Sawyer's with me, he's breathing, just give him a second."
"Jackson." A pause, long enough that Flo almost said his name again, and then: "...Still here."
Six accounted for. Flo turned her head, slowly, careful of her own neck, toward the front of the craft, toward the cockpit divider that had buckled inward under the impact.
She didn't need to check twice. The angle of Halvorsen's head against the shattered console told her everything the silence from that direction had already told her. He'd flown them in himself, manual, ugly, exactly the way Dee had told him to, and it had bought them a landing that seven of them had walked away from and cost him everything.
"Pilot's gone," Flo said, flat, because there wasn't a way to say it that made it smaller. "Everybody hear me? Pilot's gone."
Nobody said anything to that. Sasha closed her eyes for one long second, and Flo let her have it.
She unclipped her own harness first, floated, no, didn't float, she registered with a small distant surprise, there was weight here, wrong-feeling and heavier than Earth-standard but weight nonetheless, artificial gravity or the station's own mass doing something to physics she didn't have time to think about yet, and found her boots under her, solid, planted.
The hatch had buckled at one corner, same as the corridor hatch back on Scotty's Dilemma, and Flo went to work on the manual release with hands that weren't quite steady but were steady enough, forcing the mechanism until it gave in with a shriek of protesting metal.
"On me," she said. "Everyone unstrap. Help each other."
Cade already had Sawyer's harness undone, hauling him up onto legs that didn't quite want to hold him yet, murmuring something low and steady the whole time. Dee reached over and got Sasha's stuck buckle free with a hard yank, and Sasha reached back and steadied Fox as he came up unsteady from his own seat, the two of them leaning into each other for one brief unthinking second before both remembering themselves and straightening up separately.
Jackson unclipped his own harness alone, stood without help, and looked at the ruin of the cockpit, at Halvorsen's still shape, with an expression Flo couldn't read at all, not satisfaction, not grief exactly, something flatter and more private than either.
Nobody offered him a hand. He hadn't asked for one, and by now nobody expected him to.
Flo turned back to the buckled hatch, to the strange light bleeding in around its edges, not starlight, not anything she recognized, a cold blue-white glow that came from everywhere and nowhere at once, and keyed her suit comms to the only channel that still mattered.
"Everyone's up," she said. "Everyone's breathing. We're inside their station, we've got no pilot, no ship, and no idea what's on the other side of this hatch."
She looked back at her squad. Six faces looking back at her, scared in six different registers, waiting for the next thing because she was the one who was supposed to have it.
"So we're going to find out," she said, and pulled the hatch the rest of the way open.