Mark “Coop” Cooper
Location: Cobalt Station, System 1776, New Lancashire, United Commonwealth of Colonies
Coop was drowning in darkness, but it was a good drowning. It was hard to explain how something that would kill you felt good, but it did. All the worries in his life were gone while blackness wrapped him in a comfortable cocoon. He wasn’t worried about getting shot at. He wasn’t worried about Gunney Topper giving him the shit details all over Honest Abe. He wasn’t even worried about the next woman he was going to chase – he’d found a particularly large-chested engineering spacer who looked open to the possibility of a midnight romp in the depths of Abe’s maintenance compartments. Hell, he didn’t even worry about Eve Berg and what that crazy bitch was up to.
He was completely comfortable in his bed of darkness.
That all changed in an instant. It felt like someone had stuck a grav-rocket to his back and kicked it into full gear. A light appeared above him as he was quickly propelled to the surface. As the light got closer his level of comfort lessened until finally he was thrust back into the neck-deep shit of the waking world.
“What?” It took him several seconds to focus. His vision was still a little blurred, and he was having trouble feeling his face.
SUIT INTEGRITY BREECHED
The glaring red letters flashed across his HUD along with a dozen other error codes.
“Ugh…fuck.” He wanted to move, but everything felt like it weighed a million kilos.
“Good, you’re awake.”
Coop honed in on the voice and looked up. A sweat-drenched face with dripping golden hair and blue flecks in his eyes was looking down at him. It was about that time that Coop realized he was moving slowly – very slowly – in the opposite direction.
“What?” Coop repeated as he swiveled his sensors around three hundred and sixty degrees to get his bearings.
What had happened before the comforting darkness started to come back to him. His squad of marines had assaulted some under siege miner’s colony in the ass end of nowhere. Not only had there been hundreds of miners trying to kill them, but they’d been armed with modern rifles. The marines had taken casualties, but had fought their way through. They didn’t have the numbers to retake the whole station against that type of resistance, but they were able to accomplish their secondary mission of finding some bone-headed ship captain that got captured by the enemy.
“We need to get the hell out of here.” Coop braced himself to get to his feet.
“No.” The officer put pressure on him to keep him down. “Don’t.”
The man was strong, but he wasn’t a match for an HI trooper in armor. Coop got his arm under himself and pushed up. He got high enough that he could get his legs under him and… he went tumbling to the left and crashed into the wall with the screech of metal against metal.
“What the fuck?”
“Don’t look down.” The officer ordered, but telling someone not to look down made them automatically look down.
There were very few times Mark Cooper had been rendered speechless in his nineteen years of life, and this was one of them. One of his armored legs ended just below the knee in a large ball of metal. It was multi-colored from whatever had gone into making it, but it was smooth in a way only enhanced gravity could accomplish.
The memory of what had happened just before the darkness fell on him like a ton of bricks.
He’d found the captain, the dude who was now trying to drag him up a set of stairs with little success. The other marine with him had gotten knifed by some little shit while someone else had gotten a hold of a Buss and was unleashing hell on them. He’d been carrying the captain and the injured marine when the grenade had been lobbed in. He’d pushed off with as much power as he could and thrown the two guys clear. Apparently, it hadn’t been far enough. The tremendous force of focused gravity had grabbed hold of him and never let go.
“Private,” the older man stopped to take a few deep breaths. “We need to get out of here right now. The pirates have got reinforcements coming and your squad mate is buying us time to get to cover. We need to move.”
The sound of gunfire hit Coop’s ears like someone had flipped a switch. It was easy to tell the difference between the M3’s 1mm rounds and the Buss’ 3mm rounds. There were a lot more 3mm rounds coming in their direction than 1mm rounds defending them.
“Help me.” The last thing Coop wanted to do was look weak in front of someone with blue in their eyes, but he didn’t have much choice.
The officer got under Coop’s left armpit and heaved. Coop got his foot underneath himself and did a one-legged squat. They got Coop to his feet, but hopping up the stairs was a completely different matter.
“Shit!” They were nearly to the top when Coop froze and looked around. “Where’s my weapon?”
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The officer gave a look down to Coop’s thick stump and then back up at his helmeted-head. No more words were necessary.
“We need to find cover. This place is crawling with pirates.” The officer’s eyes were darting around the new hallway they were stumbling down.
“We cleared a lot of this place.” Coop informed.
He strained to hear the sounds of a gunfight behind them, but an eerie quiet had settled over this part of the station. The churning of the engineering and mining processes could still be heard, but there were no more pops of gunfire. He took that as a bad sign.
Coop had only spent a small amount of time with the SSG, but he seemed like a good guy and a good marine. Now he’d probably had his head blown off by whomever the fuck had stolen that Buss. To make matters even worse, Coop and the officer were now sitting ducks. The only bright side in the otherwise supremely shitty last ten minutes was that Coop felt good –really good –pharmaceutically enhanced good. There was no other explanation of how we was able to get around while missing the bottom quarter of his leg.
They limped around the corner and saw people at the end of the corridor. The officer almost yelled out, but Coop stopped him by pulling him back around the ninety-degree bend.
“What…?”
“Those aren’t our people.” Despite the damage to the armor the friend-or-foe indicator still worked perfectly, and STRATNET was not registering those people as the good guys. “They’re hunting us.”
Coop appreciated the fact that the officer didn’t start to whine like a little bitch, but there was still a lot of fear in his bruised eyes. The more Coop thought about it the more he was afraid. They were in the middle of hostile territory. He didn’t know what had happened to the other marines, but the SSG was probably dead, and so was anyone else who went up against that Buss. They needed a plan.
“I saw a door part way down the hall. Let’s get to it and lay low for a second. We need to figure out what to do.” Coop got a nod of agreement from the officer.
They waited until the pirates vanished into another room and scurried as quietly as they could down the hall. Thankfully, the door was open and they pushed through it. It looked like a breakroom. There was a large food dispenser, tables, chairs, and an old, dirty holo-screen. It was nothing but static right now since the gunboat and destroyer were jamming any transmission into the station. That only made their escape plan that much harder.
Coop collapsed onto the floor and the officer did the same. They spent a few moments just sitting there catching their breath. They’d only walked a couple of hundred meters, but hopping on one leg and propping up someone in armor was no walk in the park.
“I’m Lieutenant Commander Benjamin Gold, but given our current predicament you can call me Ben.” The officer extended his hand.
“Private First Class Mark Cooper. Call me Coop.” Coop took the big man’s soft hand and made sure he didn’t crush it.
“Ok, Coop, so what is the plan?” Ben wiped sweat from his brow and looked longingly at the food dispenser.
Coop thought it was weird that he – the lowly enlisted grunt – was making the plan over the officer. An officer, who if he was in the infantry, would be a battalion commander.
“The plan is simple, Sir. We get the hell off this bucket of bolts. My squad came in on a Spyder that crashed in the hangar bay. I don’t know if it’s space worthy, but it has big guns. I’ll radio them and get the situation. We’ll also check in with whoever is in charge of the rescue force now and get instructions.” Coop finished, but the officer was already shaking his head.
“No radios. The two pirates that were holding me captive grabbed a bunch of Commonwealth gear from a storage locker before you arrived, including a big communication’s node. They’re probably patched in and listening to everything you’ve been saying.”
Coop opened his mouth to argue, but snapped it shut. The backwoods miners did have modern rifles, the guys guarding the officer were pretty ready for them when they came to rescue him, and they’d been easily followed when they’d first started to clear that station. The bad guys listening in on their comms traffic was a pretty good explanation for that.
“Ok, no commo.” Coop made the executive decision on that. “But we aren’t going to make it to the rendezvous point of the hangar bay without a weapon. We’re sitting ducks here, especially you.”
Coop at least had the armor. All Ben had was a feeble smartcloth uniform.
“Then let’s get some weapons.” Ben said it like it was the simplest thing in the world.
“Sure, Sir. Let me just poke my head out of here and ask those nice miners for their guns.” Coop laid on the sarcasm pretty thick, and Ben blushed.
“I mean let’s set a trap and take them.” Ben clarified, but it was still easier said than done.
Ben gave him a hand.
“Sir, with all due respect,” Coop was planning on saying something not very respectful when the door hissed behind them.
It slid open to reveal two miners with their weapons dangling in front of them on makeshift straps. There was an awkward moment where the four men just stared at each other before springing into action.
“Fuck…!” Both miners yelled as they fumbled to bring the rifles on target.
Coop didn’t have any such fumbling. With training engrained into him he activated the twin blades in his LACS’ forearms. The meters-long, nano-edged weapons erupted forward as he lunged. The miners didn’t get their muzzles up above their hips before Coop’s blades slid effortlessly through their chests. The weapons were meant to cut HI armor, so human flesh was like cutting paper.
The blades exploded out the miners’ backs and painted the hallway in a gory Picasso of blood and pulverized tissue.
“Grab the guns,” Coop hollered as he lost his balance and fell forward.
He collapsed onto of the two men he’d just killed making even more of a mess. They didn’t explode like pieces of fruit dropped off a building, but it wasn’t pretty. Ben scrambled forward and collected the two M3s and Coop struggled to his knees and retracted his blades. He looked like he’d just gone on a rampage. Blood and guts covered the front of his armor and dripped from his forearms.
Ben handed him one M3, which he used to help prop himself up before running a diagnostic check.
“How did you…?” The officer asked sheepishly.
“Give it to me.” Coop handed Ben the weapon he knew was good to go, and ran a second test. The miners hadn’t had the weapons long enough to screw anything up, and they hadn’t fired more than a few rounds between them. “Please tell me you at least know how to shoot.”
“It’s been a few years,” Ben answered defensively, “but I remember the basics.”
“Just point it at the bad guys and pull the trigger.” Coop didn’t have a lot of confidence in the officer’s ability to hit anything. “It will at least make them keep their heads down so I can maneuver and finish them off.”
Coop stuck his head out the door and looked both ways. It was clear. “Let’s move, Sir. You take left and I’ll take right and behind us.” It was a horrible arrangement to cover everything, but there weren’t many good options on the table.
Coop just hoped they could get to where they needed to go in one piece. If they got back to the Fleet they’d be able to fix his leg up lickety-split.
The big-chested engineer would have to wait, but Coop had always wanted to try his luck with a nurse. He’d definitely have the sympathy angle working in his favor.