We advance for about a couple of minutes when we reach an elevator platform, but there’s a bioscanner lock on it.

“Give me a moment” Says Luca as he touches the edge of the platform, connecting to it’s interface “It’s easy to get through the general system defenses but they have almost everything connected remotely through a convoluted connection so it’s gonna be worse to direct the whole system from the same subroutines”

“...” I stand there in silence.

“If i had to unlock this from the entry point i got before it would take us at least five earthen minutes” He explains as he probably understood my lack of communication “They probably have take that much time to use the elevator normally as well”

I’m slightly baffled at the living conditions of the crew of this ship. Five minutes queue for an elevator? In 2290? What is this, the Information Era?

“Got it, how much time do you need?” I ask him.

“...” He doesn’t answer as he taps an invisible keyboard on this forearm, but then looks at me “Done”.

“What the hell are you even doing in the army?” He could have a dazzling career as far as i guess with that type of skill. Shit, if even Hallie is not able to keep up, this kid is a tech genius. He just shrugs at my comment as if there wasn’t any kind of deep answer, but i’ll get him to spit the details for me later.

“Move people, inside, now!” I command, and they all follow me and get over the platform. We only have a wall behind us, and the front of this elevator is all open to the corridor it’s located in. As Luca directs the elevator to the second floor, we see some lights on the border of the platform, but we also see a squad of heavily armed pirates turning our way in the nearest corner, fully aware of our position.

We see as they open fire immediately upon us, and Santángel gets to the front and deploys a double layered shield to provide cover. The shield blocks the first barrage of shots but collapses when a massive-looking pirate points a wide mass of cilindric metal at us, and we see a flash of light crash on the shield, that instantly disappears, before the elevators lifts, and we almost get teleported to our destination.

When we arrive, the first thing we do is advance to ascertain if there’s no hostiles in sight, and there’s none yet. I turn back, and see that we have three wounded, Santángel one of them; he stood at the front when that beam hit us, and he’s got some ugly looking burns on his left arm, up to his ear, if he had any hair it’d have burnt off most likely. The other wounded are one of our front gunners and one of our marksmen, the former missing an ear and the latter having a bleeding hole in the left side of his chest. His face is contorting in pain, and changing color from brown to dark red.

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Our medic, a mature woman named Yvonne rushes to him, as do i. She grabs the soldier before he collapses to the ground, convulsing.

“Easy Ihmad, easy” She tells him in a soothing voice. I see the wound, and I understand why. His heart is damaged… he’s going to die.

Hallie, can we save him?

[Negative. The degree of wound in soldier Ihmad el Aybissani’s chest is mortal, only grade six healing technomancy spells could provide for first aid]

My face sanks as we both watch him slowly stop convulsing, and then become still. The rest of the squad are providing cover for us, aiming their weapons straight without looking back, but they are aware of what just happened. No words needed, when you’ve lived through this kind of stuff, you learn to recognize the silences, and even with the incessant alarm still going off on the whole station, there’s a silence here right now.

Some soldiers died during the mission on Nemea-05, but it’s different when you get to know the fallen ones. And now, I see as one of the men under my care has breathed his last, and an emotion I had forgotten how it felt surged once again.

Regret.

Should I have approached the mission differently? Did I make a mistake in planning? Could this have been avoided? In the bottom, I knew that a fallen soldier is common in a battlefield, much more during a mission like this in which we are severely outnumbered in an unknown terrain. I’ve seen a lot of colleagues die over the years… but, this one is hitting different.

[Abnormal mental condition detected, stabilizing…]

I ignore Hallie’s voice, there’s something bothering me.

Why didn’t i feel like this when i learned that all the people in the UN-Charon died a hundred years ago? That i was the only survivor? I spent almost ten years with those guys and they were the closest to a family I had; I'm not an expressive woman, that I know, but… going over my feelings at the time, it doesn't make sense. I had some many memories with them…

[User status is currently altered, suggesting temporal retreat while stabilization—]

Shut up.

Why can’t I remember my experiences with them?

My breathing becomes ragged, and Yvonne besides me places Ihmad on the ground and then gets close to me.

“It’s alright commander, we all knew what to expect” She says, placing a hand on my back, and then going to treat the marksmen with the missing ear, having to stop the bleeding, even if said soldier was knee on the ground, rifle up, ready for combat despite the pain.

“It’s alright cherry, we all knew what to expect” Said the voice of captain Cadogan, rumbling in my head. He told me that when I witnessed my first death, but who died?

As I continue to freak out at my memory loss, a squad of pirates reaches out to us. Thankfully, the rest of the team set up an impromptu cover with a portable barrier. The thing is, this one is the only one we’ve got, as it’s quite hard to set up properly and weighs at least ten kilograms. Santángel was the one carrying it, and even he preferred not to use it before because of the time it needed to prepare. This time, as soon as he saw that there were other wounded besides himself, he set it up and now that was our lifeline. These corridors were an issue for direct engagements like this, as there was no proper way to defend, and you could only hope to either take by surprise, or kill before you got killed.

[Stability… unable to calculate, please stay on hold]

I got up from my feet with some trouble, and looked ahead. I saw the pirates shooting at us, while our guys shot at them back. Our defense was still in place and they were falling to the precision of our gunners, but it was a matter of time before reinforcements came.

I gritted my teeth so hard that the taste of blood filled my mouth, and I glared at our enemies. My thoughts were still a mess, but I knew that the bastards in front of us were in desperate need of killing.