He reached for her, naturally.

Instinct more than a conscious decision on his part. After all, when you saw someone in trouble, you helped them.

And the woman was in trouble. He could see the sheer terror in her eyes. Nor did he blame her for that fear. As a marine, he and the rest of his cadre had been extensively briefed on what happened to a body exposed to the cold vacuum of space. An attempt to drill in the need for soldiers to don helmets if they even suspected that a loss of pressure was possible.

It had made sense at the time, but as his conscious mind caught up with his actions and he aborted his move to reach for the woman, he wondered if it was perhaps a cruelty?

Because both he and she knew what was about to happen to her as she was whisked out through the massive hole in the ship and into the cold unfeeling blackness of space.

It was a little surreal for him.

One moment the woman was there. Then she was gone. Not even a sound to mark her passing.

Does that count as my first kill? he wondered inanely.

The thought was as morbid as it was irreverent, but it stuck in his mind regardless.

He turned back down the hall and started walking toward the next sealed bulkhead door. He had a feeling this moment would haunt him in the weeks, months or years to come – but for the moment he felt little more than a fuzzy numbness. Perhaps that was for the best? He had a job to do after all. And he doubted he’d be able to accomplish that job if he threw up in his helmet.

Then again, the mask does have a drainage feature, he remembered.

Given the sort of maneuvers a suit under the effect of an anti-grav drive might undergo, it only made sense to install a means of cleaning the inside of a mask when a pilot inevitably lost control of their stomach.

Wouldn’t do to invest hundreds of thousands of credits into training and outfitting a pilot, only for them to drown in their own vomit after a few high intensity flips, he thought with a giggle.

Then he threw up.

------------------

As he strode through the Maw’s wide halls not more than five minutes later – a five minutes he was trying not to dwell on - he found that his eyes were watering. Though whether that was a result of his recently acquired murder-based trauma, or the acrid smell of vomit in his suit, he could not say.

At the very least, we now know that the suit’s helmet drainage is functional, he thought grimly.

It hadn’t totally removed the results of his recent loss of gut control, but it had drained his helmet enough that he was now no longer in danger of drowning in the liquified remains of his lunch. Though, said lunch was not entirely gone. The odor remained. Haunting him.

“Like the ghost of meals past,” he muttered as he tore down another set of bulkhead doors – and received a veritable barrage of fire from the other side. “Shit!”

Alarms blared in his suit as it registered dozens of hits as he, somewhat instinctively, dove to the side.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thought as blue highlighted laser fire continued to rip through the doorway, bits of metal melting or flaking away from the side closest to him as shots silently slammed into it.

He’d just walked faced first into an ambush because he’d had his head in the clouds.

Get your head in the game Marine! he could almost imagine his instructors from the Crucible yelling at him. You don’t need to think! Think on your own time! Do as we told you!

“Ares, replay last five seconds of camera feed,” he grunted, trying to ignore the adrenaline rushing through his veins.

“Replaying,” the suit’s relaxing baritone intoned.

He ignored the continued fire thudding into the cover he was being provided by the bulkhead door’s side-walls. Instead, he stared at the video feed that had formed in the top right of his HUD.

“Five crewmembers. Masked. Two rifles. Three pistols. Light cover,” he noted, just as Assisse had taught him. He turned to face his cover as the twin prongs of his railgun slid out from their housing. “Mark them.”

“Marking,” Ares intoned, as outlines formed over the five combatant’s last seen locations.

Jason didn’t pop out. He pressed his weapon against his metal cover.

What did the old bastard always say when we went hunting? He wondered. Don’t think of it as something living, son. It’s just a target. Easy in. Easy out. When you’re ready, squeeze it.

He squeezed. Five times.

Despite the fact that he was firing from the hip, he knew every shot was in the center mass of those five outlines. He’d felt the suit moving to adjust his aim as he squeezed the thumb trigger.

Again, he felt no recoil and heard no sound as the outlines dissipated in sequence. Flecks of metal did stop pinging off the open doorway to his right though.

Time to see if my time spent fine tuning the targeting system wasn’t wasted, he thought, swallowing the lump that seemed to have formed in his throat as he stepped out. Cutting the cake as he did so, moving from the left side to the right of the doorway in one smooth motion, cataloguing each thing he saw inside the room as he did.

It was carnage.

His shots had gone through his cover, the packing boxes the militia women had set up as their own cover, and the armor of the militia women themselves. Front and back. More to the point, only one of them had apparently moved between the time he’d first seen her and his own firing.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Number four, he noted clinically as he took in the bodies.

While the others had been speared through the chest by his high velocity rounds - and now lay spread out grizzly blue pools of blood – number four had only been clipped. Not that it had done her all that much good.

She’d been hit by a round from a railgun after all.

The woman lay against the wall, where she’d either crawled or simply fell, clutching at an arm that terminated just above the elbow. It wasn’t bleeding – much - likely because the woman’s suit had already flooded her system with a cocktail of drugs, as well as started applying pressure around the wound.

Shil’vati armor tech was fancy like that. Even the cheaper models, which was likely what the women opposite him had all been wearing.

Not that it would have helped them if they were wearing the same top of the line stuff the marines use, he thought as he stepped past the one-armed woman.

She wasn’t a threat to him anymore. She might have had a second arm, but she wasn’t in any state to use it. He wasn’t even sure she was even still conscious. She’d been writhing on the floor when he’d first turned the corner, but that writhing had given way to stillness in the few seconds he’d been taking in the scene.

She might already be dead – though he doubted it. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to think about what he’d just done or her. He couldn’t afford to.

He had to get to the bridge.

This time when he approached the next bulkhead door, he did so with a great deal more caution. Sure, he still ripped it off its hinges, but he did so from the side this time. So only his arm was exposed, and only for a moment.

His suit was tough, but enough hits would compromise the armor’s integrity. Even a casual glance at his HUD told him that a number of plates had dropped from a healthy green to a sickly yellow - likely as a result of that initial barrage of shots he’d taken.

Which, while hardly world ending, was not good. Especially when it could have been easily avoided if he’d just focused on the task at hand.

Though even that has limits, he thought.

Normally pilots used speed to mitigate their Exo’s relative weakness to small arms fire, but neither he or the Ares could do that. So he’d just have to avoid being hit as much as humanly possible in the same way he would if he weren’t in the suit.

Which meant that when he did peek inside, he did so by slicing the cake. Slowly. One side to the other. Minimizing the amount of threats that could enter his field of vision in any given moment. Satisfied the next area was empty, he stepped inside, leaving the gory mess he’d created behind.

It was likely only the first of many after all.

--------------

“I’ve no idea how Tisi rustled up an Exo, but just watching you stumble around in it tells me that you’re not a real pilot,” Hela’s voice rang out through an open comm channel.

Jason acknowledged the point as he stepped through another set of barricades, ignoring the blue blood that was now sloshing around his feet. He didn’t think he was doing badly at this whole piloting thing – as this latest firefight attested - but he could also admit that he was hardly a font of grace either.

“Which is why I know you’re not getting to wherever you’re heading. I’ve got my entire crew bearing down on you. You might get a few more of them, but they are going to bring you down.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not, he thought as he glanced at his sparking left shoulder, where an armor plate had already failed after taking too many hits in succession.

Still, while the Maw was a large ship, it was also a civilian vessel. A trading vessel. It’s main concern was profit, and it was designed and crewed with that in mind. And every crew member drew pay. Which cut down on those profits. So he suspected that in order to avoid losing profits, the Maw did not have as many crew members as its massive size would imply.

After all, the massive supertankers on Earth only had a crew of about twenty or so. Why would the Maw be any different?

And I’ve already killed nine or so, he thought as he moved past a trio of recently made corpses to cave in the doorway they’d been defending.

“So I’m guessing you’re either Assisse or Scales, in all likelihood?” the merchant continued.

Jason wasn’t totally surprised, or even offended at his exclusion from that list - despite the fact that he was the third marine aboard the Whisker. Even ignoring his gender and the assumptions that went with it, if Tisi had sent one of her crew on a mission like this – which Hela naturally assumed was the case – it wouldn’t make much sense for her to send the one individual Hela actually wanted aboard.

Nor was he surprised that Hela was familiar enough with the crew of the Whisker to guess which members of the crew might occupy the suit that was currently invading her ship. She’d been friends with Tisi for a very long time, after all.

“But do you have any idea what you’re risking by being here? Tisi’s sent you on a suicide mission. You know that right? All to protect a single male who wasn’t even in that much danger?” Hela lectured. “Do you know what’s going to happen to you if I have to peel you out of that suit? It’s not going to be pretty. I can promise you that. Sure, I might be falling for the old ‘sunk cost fallacy’, but given that I’ve probably already killed a number of Shil’vati crew-women and an Interior agent, I’m hardly going to be in much more trouble for summarily executing someone boarding my ship and killing my crew.”

The woman sighed. “After all, if I’m going to get the pirate label, I might as well act the part.”

Jason barely heard the last part of that rather pathetic diatribe. No, his focus had been taken up by the part in the middle where the woman had claimed to have possibly killed an Interior agent and her crew.

Which could only mean Pernora. And while he didn’t like the woman, he didn’t want her dead either.

“But while I might be labeled a pirate, I’m a businesswoman at heart. So how about we make a deal? Me and you?”

Jason battered down another door and frowned a little as no rush of air blasted out as he did. Glancing into the room, he found himself looking out into a truly vast storage bay rather than the cramped hallways he’d become so accustomed to over the last fifteen minute. And the place was massive. As if, someone had taken a football stadium and filled it with shipping containers from end to end, ceiling to roof.

Glancing at his mini-map, he was relieved to see that he was still on course for the bridge – his mapping software had just decided that given his current rate of progress, it would be faster for him to move through the relatively open storage bay, rather than continue slogging through the winding maze that was the service corridors.

Neat, he thought as he took off at a run. Something the suit was more than capable of doing, even without the aid provided by a working anti-grav drive.

“-that way I don’t have to hire on more crew, and you get to survive. A win-win for everyone involved. Hell, you’ll even get a new job out of this. One that’ll pay a hell of a lot more than the Imperial military.”

Hela continued to drone on and on, but he wasn’t listening. Hell, the only reason he hadn’t shut off his comms completely was that the woman’s soulless bargaining was just slightly more palatable than the eerie silence forced onto him while operating in a vacuum.

Still, just because his human senses were all but useless in an environment like this, didn’t mean that those aboard the suit were. Which meant that when something burst out of one of the alleys made by stacked shipping containers to his right, he had just enough warning to jump out of the way.

Sure, it wasn’t the most dignified dodge in the world, but it did the job. It even allowed him to dodge a second time as he pivoted to face his attacker and found himself face to face with a rather menacing looking Exo. One that had a few good feet on his own fairly diminutive model.

Civilian model, he noted – a little frantically - as he leapt away from the massive industrial machine, nimbly avoiding the thing’s powerful hand-clamps. Military grade armor or not, those things would squish him like a bug if they managed to get ahold of him.

Fortunately, the machine was as slow as it was powerful. And it was most assuredly not designed for combat. That ambush had been a gambit, and it had failed. Jason’s own far more nimble machine could easily outpace the far more lumbering mech.

More to the point, his exo was armed. Despite the near miss of moments prior, it was with an almost casual tone that he lifted his railgun to fire.

Which was why he was taken so off-guard when he felt the very ground shake beneath his feet, as alarms blared in his helmet, warning him that something very large had just landed behind him.

They had a second mech, he noted, as he turned to switch to the far closer, and thus more dangerous, target. It must have been hiding atop the container stacks.

The first exo had been a diversion.

Desperately trying to draw a bead on the second exo – an identical model to the first – he felt his heart skip a beat as the second machine caught his rail-gun equipped arm in one of if its clamps with surprising deftness for such a cumbersome vehicle.

Then it started to squeeze, sending even more alarms screaming through Jason’s helmet as the arm in his suit's HUD turned a ruddy flashing red color.

Naturally, he tried to pull away the trapped limb away, more instinct than conscious choice - like an animal with its leg trapped in a bear trap.

Which had predictable results…

With a shriek that transferred through the very suit itself, Ares’s forearm came off in the second exo’s grip, sending Jason skipping backward at the sudden loss of tension. The only reason Jason’s arm didn’t go with it was because it didn’t reach that far into the mech’s limbs – instead terminating with a dolly grip somewhere near the elbow.

Not that he had time to dwell on it, as another blaring alarm reminded him that the first exo was still present and had used the time to catch up to him. The fist it through narrowly missed him as he ducked beneath it, franticly swerving out from between the two attackers as he blindly jumped back to gain some distance.

Something the pair of exo’s seemed content for him to do, as they turned to watch his now one-armed mech, skid to a stop in front of a stack of cargo crates.

“Ooh, you seem to have left something behind there,” Hela taunted over the comms.

As if to punctuate her statement, the second exo held his severed – and more importantly, rail-gun equipped – forearm in the air, like some kind of grizzly robotic trophy.

Then it squeezed.

Jason watched with resignation as the limb and weapon crumpled in the industrial mech’s claw. Within moments, two pieces of mangled machinery fell to the floor, with what he imagined might have been an audible thud, had there been a gas of any kind with which to transfer the sound.

Instead, he found he could hear little but the thudding of his heart in his heart in his chest and the rushing of blood in his ears as the two much bigger, much heavier, exos advanced on his one armed machine.

“So, are we ready to negotiate now?” Hela asked smugly. “Regardless of how this happened, I’m still a generous woman. That exo of yours is still worth something, and I do still need some hired help to replace the women you killed on this little mission of yours.”

Jason stared as the two exos stopped in their tracks, not more than two meters away from him.

“Or are you going to die rather messily here and now for a boy that’ll never even give you a second glance?”

Jason sighed.

“Go fuck yourself, Hela.”