Juarez just turned and glared at me. No doubt he thought my question was the height of idiocy.

“What do you think? Do I sound good?” His voice was tense and frustrated. He wasn’t good, not by any stretch of the imagination. In hindsight, I should have known better than to ask.

I stifled a frustrated sigh, giving him a stern look instead. “Look, I didn’t take you for a boot private with anger issues. Deal with your shit. I can't afford to do this right now. Can you? Stand down, alright? You read me?”

“I read you.” He nodded stiffly, impassive faceplate locking with mine for a moment. He seemed to be reining in his rage, so I felt a little bit more comfortable not hovering over his shoulder. After our moment of mutual understanding, I turned my attention to other matters and decided to check in on the Bridge.

With the jammers down we had comms again, but a cursory check revealed they were only back up in Engineering. I damned whoever was on the other side of this conflict, they wanted to make my life a living hell, apparently. There was no way a bunch of portable and localised jammers could reach across the whole ship, so whoever set them up hadn’t even tried, was my guess. Instead, they’d probably just put jammers in every compartment where there was fighting, effectively shooting us in the foot when it came to coordinating a proper defense. The sheer cost of that was staggering, I guess funding wasn't something these people lacked.

I'd have to go to god knows how many places all over the ship where there was heavy fighting, find the jammers and then get rid of them if I wanted to restore communications entirely. That was entirely unfeasible for one man, or even one squad. It would just take too long. I examined my tacmap with concern. There were red and black hazard lines painting all of the Bridge, Medical and even a large chunk of Officer Country. I didn’t like that one bit. If comms were still down in every one of those key sections, we could very well have already lost them to the enemy.

Without the ability to call the Bridge or those posted to guard it, I had no way to know if that was true, or how bad the fighting was up there.

It had crossed my mind that the bomb threat could’ve been a ploy by the enemy, but I don’t think any of us wanted to risk being wrong about that. If we stayed and it went off, well I didn't want to find out what kind of bomb it was and neither did anyone else, I was certain. Probably, it was the kind that you didn't walk away from.

I tried to reach Sergeant Hoffman one last time before we abandoned ship, and surprisingly, I actually managed to ping his suit. It took me about five seconds of impatient waiting before my suit managed to sync up with his. My suit cheerfully informed me his vitals were in a bad state, specifically multiple deep lacerations and severe blunt-force trauma as well as eighteen separate bullet wounds in a tight spread over his sternum. There was a note that he was combat ineffective. I didn’t have to think long on what that meant. He was dead. Our suits were tough, but not that tough. They could shrug off a few rounds, if you didn't have them all hit you in the same spot, but eighteen in such a small area?

Not a chance in hell.

“Hoffman’s dead. Chen, with me." My eyes flicked to my HUD. Nothing, not a single sign of enemy movement. No one seemed to care that we were trying to escape. "There's nothing else we can do here. We need to leave now.” I said.

"Bugging out." Chen said behind me as I leaned into a run.

I bolted for the the escape pod’s entrance that Carver and Larsen had disappeared into. It was a traditional airlock affair, but both doors were wide open now. A second glance at my sensor feeds revealed no signs of enemy contact nearby. Sonar, thermals, it was like they’d just disappeared. I knew they hadn’t, if only because they couldn’t have gotten off the ship that fast, but I was tired of their ninja bullshit and being half-blind because of their ECM.

I considered the state of the battle for a moment, the recent conflict lending me a kind of accelerated-time-sense that you sometimes find in combat. I concluded this battle was definitely a defeat. The enemy’s training and willingness to remove and sanitise their own dead between encounters with us was a telling clue. I knew there were special armour modules that black ops units used to fry the occupant and melt the armour’s storage and memory. Hell I’d used one myself once.

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My suspicion was that we were dealing with something like that. Either they were some kind of unsanctioned black ops unit full of sleeper agents, or they were just a highly trained paramilitary force with a scary level of access to our infantry gear and warships. I was leaning towards the latter, unfortunately. The fact they were onboard told me this wasn’t a sanctioned op, hell the dead bodies told me that much. As for what they wanted? I had no idea. I was already speculating as it was, with a lot of questions and almost no solid answers to speak of. There was no way in hell I was going to drag one of those crispy bodies inside to get my answers though.

I didn’t have time for that, nevermind the fact it was a good way to get killed. With a potential bomb threat onboard, seconds mattered.

“Chen, get in here!” I yelled, sticking my head out the open exterior hatch more out of habit than an actual need to do so.

My eyes searched for and found Chen, but I noticed he wasn’t moving, he was like a statue. My friend was still crouched by the debris I’d hiding behind by only moments before. His weapon was still resting on a mass of scarred and battered debris, but he was acting strange. He was rooted to the spot, staring up at something in the corner of the room, frozen stiff like he was in a trance. Chen fidgeted with his rifle, but didn’t move it, he didn’t move almost at all, in fact, all his movements were small and jittery.

“Damn it, Chen! This is not the time for bullshit. Get in the fucking pod!” I roared, half-raising my rifle as I leaned around the hatchway to get a better look at things.

I put a burst into the corner of the room that had enchanted Chen, large marks tearing into the metal as my weapon reached out and touched the spot he was watching.

Thankfully, he was shaken from his odd stupor by the gunfire. Chen whirled, half running and half stumbling into the pod with his squad automatic weapon in his hands. As soon as he cleared the threshold, I ducked back inside before closing and locking the airlock and the exterior hatch. I was reassured by the satisfying clunk and whir of the locking mechanism.

Escape pod hatches were thick and the seals were solid, it felt good to have an extra layer of steel between me and all the horrible shit on the ship, like dirty bombs and enemy infantry. Shaking my head, I ducked back into the escape pod and waited by the closed hatch.

“Juarez, our pod is full, good luck.” I told him over the network.

“I was about fifteen metres to your left ten seconds ago, I know that, dumbass. See you when we’re picked up.” He said.

I rolled my eyes at his response and double-checked the seal on the pod’s hatch. It read as green so I figured we weren’t in danger of sudden decompression, flying debris and weapons fire notwithstanding.

“Launch us, ASAP. Comms blackout and retrorocket firing in accordance with protocol. I don't want to be picked off by our own guns because we decided to talk to each other too soon.” I told Carver. He just gave me a half-assed salute without turning to face me.

Unperturbed by Carver’s lacking response, I turned to Chen as the big man lowered himself to sit on the floor with deliberate care, his SAW resting next to him.

“Chen. What did you see? What the hell was all that?”

I hadn’t seen or heard anything, but I didn’t believe Chen was crazy enough to just stare at a spot on the wall with a dirty bomb onboard that could blow at any time in the middle of combat. That was the type of crazy stunt I’d expect from recruits with a death wish or a mental defect.

That didn’t rule out the fact Chen might be nuts, of course, but he didn’t have a death wish, I knew the type well. I’d never seen anyone snap personally, but I did know it could happen without much warning and under extreme stress. Maybe Chen was one of the unlucky ones. I doubted we’d have a head doctor around for a while, at least until we were recovered by the SAR teams and debriefed.

Before I forgot, I dug into the ship’s network and accessed my team’s personal directory in the ship’s database. Most of us had a few shows or a large library of books in our personal directories for long voyages and I was no exception. Seeing as how it might be a while before we were rescued, I queued the transfer of the team’s files to our escape pod.

Hopefully, it would finish before we had to leave. We had backups of it all back home, of course, but they were back home. A stack of movie and shows wouldn’t do us much good if we were stuck in deep space for a week or two, or even longer. There were a lot of technical manuals as well as movies and such to keep us entertained in our personal files, stuff I doubted any of us would want to go without. Entertainment wasn’t exactly a priority, but the team’s morale was about to be. I had a spare moment, so I used it. With that done, I put it out of my mind.

I found Chen was slumped down on the floor now, leaning against the wall with his helmet off and eyes closed. His forehead was soaked in sweat and his hair was matted and damp. That by itself wasn’t unusual after combat, but there was something about him that definitely was unusual at that moment. My eyebrows furrowed in concern before I asked him what was on my mind.