Sergeant Emily Gułminski lead her assault team out of the cargo bay. Her first choice dismayed her a bit. The orders were to use a subdued approach. Typically, she’d lob grenades down the stairwell they approached to the lower floor, then go in guns blazing. But if there wasn’t an ambush waiting in the stairwell, then the element of surprise would go away. Besides, she imagined that it was more likely that they’d put mines or some other boobytrap in a stairwell than attempt a stand in a narrow, restricted corridor.
Her suspicions as she cracked open the door and swept the grounds with her Enhanced Targeting Scope. It picked up a sliver of a detonation cord thread, rigged to explode when the door opened. If they were caught in an explosion in a stairwell, the force multiplier from the explosion would turn her squadron into jelly. Fortunately, this wasn’t a sophisticated trap, and she pulled out her vibroblade and cut through the detonation cord. She picked up the bounding mine from the blind side of the door and handed it back to her squadron, who dutifully passed it to the support squad.
She kept sweeping her rifle below and above her to see if there were any other identifiable threats. Satisfied there weren’t, she made her way down the stairwell. She entered into the engineering room, where two fusion reactors powered the ship. She didn’t want to get into a firefight here, even if the nano carbon reinforced glass would most gunfire from doing any damage to the cores. Still, this was one theory she would happily let stay in the realm of theory.
After passing through the engineering doors, they found themselves in the central hull, surrounded by fuel tanks and secondary batteries. While maybe it wouldn’t be as impressive as destroying a nuclear reactor, she still hoped no one was suicidal enough to either plant traps in here or attempt an ambush. There would be no winners in that conflict. She moved inches at a time, carefully sweeping for any traps, ambushes, or choke points, but found none. Maintaining point was a grueling job, but she knew she was the one best suited for the task. She maintained military training according to rules and regulations, but knew several people under her command did not. She made a resolution that this situation would never happen again, provided they survived long enough to see the next day.
The next area was the habitat area. Two full luxury cabins for pilot and copilot, 12 cabins, 13 bunk rooms, a six-bed automated sickbay, a briefing room, gym, and mini workshop. Luxurious compared to their cramped accommodations. Unfortunately, a terrible place to be tactically. Each group had to enter two per room, and with 31 rooms in this one area, she did not have the personnel necessary to mount a proper assault. Her team could take four rooms, team Romeo Bravo could take four rooms, leaving twenty-three points for ambush. She waited for the support team to setup their laser rifles to attack anyone who walked out of the rooms. She wished that the security group could join them and setup heavy rifles in the area, but they were back at the stairwell, preventing anyone from flanking them. She’d just have to make due.
Each battle-buddy unit went door to door, planting the eight ball charges on each door. They made sure to move as stealthily as possible while the support team provided overwatch. Their detonator cords synced up at a main point as she and SSG Harumi, Romeo Bravo’s Team Leader, counted down to the breach. They both triggered the explosives as their teams began strafing fire across the corridor, attempting to suppress anyone who might want to venture out.
She tosses a grenade into the room she was assigned and waited for the explosion before going in. She turned quickly and surveyed the small room, finding a body blown to bits scattered across the wall. The room looked like a Jackson Pollock painting gone horribly wrong. Her gag reflex started a bit on her, but she exited the room in time to see a pair of grenades getting rolled out from one of the rooms. She quickly ducked back inside the room and pulled her battle buddy down before he could exit the room.
Unfortunately, the support groups stood in the middle of the room, blasting away at the walls like they were in a Rambo movie. They never saw the grenades lobbed towards them, and had no way of ducking from the blast radius. The grenades went off, shooting a blast of shrapnel and concussive force through the support teams. Their upper torsos blew off, and only their boots and portions of their lower torso remained. The room was covered in a mix of red smoke from the blood mixing with the air and trailing whips of black smoke from the concussion grenade.
The counteroffensive began as a group of ten men came out, shooting 7mm carbine rifles at her group. They used the rooms as concealment, but chunks of it were taken off with each series of blasts. One bullet smashed into Emily’s leg, and though her pants dispersed the damage and prevented it from puncturing, it still felt like being hit with a 100 miles per hour fastball. She rolled off her partner and low-crawled to the door, using her rifle to tag all the enemies in the area and put them down.
They didn’t move in the coordinated fashion of military fighters, but did kill two of her people when six of them mowed down a room simultaneously, unleashing a bullet storm that the trapped team members in a death trap that they couldn’t avoid. Two of the icons for her team members went black.
She fired from her doorway with her battle buddy putting her rifle above her. They took out three of them immediately, one jumping for cover and the other diving useless in the wrong direction, landing in the middle of the floor. He fumbled his rifle around and tried to get off a shot, but Emily and her partner Grace took the bastard apart together, laser shots searing completely through him and taking him out.
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The fifth aimed his rifle from behind around a doorway, blindly spraying bullets at them. Emily saw other attacker’s bodies on the ground, and guessed that the ten she saw initially weren’t the only ones there. She pulled a concussive grenade out, cooked it, then threw it at the fifth attacker. The detonation of light and sound shocked him and he dropped his rifle while he curled up and covered his ears.
Grace coldly walked up on him and put a laser blast through his center mass, ending him. His body frozen in a fetal position, hands covering his ears.
They could hear gunshots going off inside the gym area, but Grace maintained enough combat savvy to wait for Emily to join her before pursuing after the gunfire. They hugged the walls with Grace maintaining point while Emily scanned for any threats they might have missed behind. Emily checked her HUD and realized that four more of her people were KIA, leaving her and Emily as the last survivors from her squadron, and fighting up the corridor continued in the workshop.
They entered into the gym and saw the assault team’s bodies strewn about with the bodies of the crew of the Void Terror. In the middle of the room, one of the team members of Romeo Bravo was fighting off a combat droid with his vibroblade sword, and having no luck with it. The machine batted away his attack and cut his arm off, before quickly reversing the blade and severing his head. The blood spurted out in a quick pulse before the cauterization stopped it.
Emily and Grace reacted a moment too late from the blood-filled horror as the robot ran at them. Grace attempted to shoot it down with her rifle while Emily pulled out her vibroblade sword and turned it on. The combat droid ran up to Emily as she attempted a thrusting stab, a bit slower than normal from her damaged calf. The droid nimbly dodged aside and counterattacked, which Emily blocked, but it lashed out a devastating kick at Grace and destroyed her rifle.
Emily kept trying to land quick, thrusting attacks at the machines body, but couldn’t land anything on the far faster and technical combat droid. Grace pulled out her vibrosword and attempted to destroy the droid as well, but it maneuvered itself so that the girls couldn’t flank it, and ended up in each other’s way.
The droid lashed out with a front kick at Grace and caught her squarely in the chest, throwing her back several feet and sending her crashing to the wall. Emily was stuck on the defensive, narrowly managed to block the rapid attacks, and the combination of watching out for the droids blade and feet made her fight in a strictly defensive manner.
She felt her leg starting to give out from constantly putting pressure on it while retreating and circling around the elusive combat droid. She had a sudden memory of her lazy ass Captain. He’d use a tactic called “defanging the snake”, where he said you shouldn’t worry about striking a lethal blow against a superior enemy, simply attack its most exposed weapon. She figured it was as good a time as any to test out her Captain’s combat advice, as her traditional training wasn’t yielding any fruit against her opponent.
She feinted another attack at its head and chopped its hand off instead. But in the fraction of a second it took for her to chop off its hand, the droid simply reached out and grabbed the vibroblade in its other hand, blocking her attack and launching a side kick into her stomach. She tumbled over and landed, maintaining her grip on the sword even as she went down. She weakly tried to defend the robot’s attack, but it hit her blade hard, sending it flying out of her grasp. She fumbled for her vibroblade knife as the droid prepared its killing blow.
Then a laser shot popped off the droid’s head, sending it tumbling to the ground. She saw Grace with a rifle that she’d recovered from one of their killed teammates, the blood dripping over it. Emily pulled herself up to her feet and recovered her rifle. She had the shakes from the exertion and adrenaline dump of combat, making her hands rattle. She tried to calm herself, but knew they needed to check the other rooms.
She peered outside with her rifle trained for threats, but only saw three of team Romeo Bravo waiting. They were maintaining a defensive perimeter trained on the next set of doors leading out. Daniel Drager was now the Team Lead for Romeo Bravo. She and Emily went about looking for any survivors on the assault team and to execute any remaining survivors amongst the Void Terror.
They found two survivors and took them to the medical bay. The fortunate thing about droid med bays is that they didn’t care which side you fought for. They began suturing, cauterizing, and injecting nanobots to heal their companions. Still, they wouldn’t be able to fight for any meaningful time.
She hit her comm-set on and set it to all. “This is team leader Staff Sergeant Emily Gulminski of Romeo Alpha. We fought thirty enemy forces in the habitat area on the second floor. All thirty are down. Both support teams of Whiskey Alpha and Whiskey Bravo are down. Only two on my team are still functional, two are in critical condition in the med bay, and three survivors from team Romeo Bravo are still in play. Hostile forces are estimated at forty strong, judging by the size of the habitat area. Over.”
She heard Daniel Drager’s voice come in on the comm line. “This is acting team lead Corporal Daniel Drager. I am confirming team leader Romeo Alpha’s assessment. Over.”
“This is team lead Staff Sergeant Violetta Wasek for Alpha Bravo reporting in. Three hostiles attempted a flank via the stair well, we put them down. Over.”
“Lieutenant Luciana Smith reporting in. Assault team, stand guard and act as a security team for your area. Med team on Alpha Bravo, move up in position and guard team members in the med bay area. When they are stable enough to move, fall back to Alpha Bravo’s position and then back to the Forward Operating Base to medically extract team members. I will be joining up as team lead for assault group Romeo Bravo.”
Emily hit her comm. “Understood ma’am. Out.”