hit with a clang that resounded through her helmet, rebounded, and went into a slow, almost graceful spin. For a moment, panic struggled with training; there was no up or down, no easy means of orienting herself. Then as she’d been taught, she put out her left arm to counter the rotation; that slowed her down enough that she could grab a handhold, coming to a bouncing halt.
She’d made it. “Fuentes on target!” she called over the general com circuit. The idea was to keep everyone apprised of where everyone else was, but she could already tell that the sheer confusion of the situation was going to overwhelm any attempts at organization or battle management.
Turning herself about, she tried to reacquire the UN trooper she’d glimpsed on the way in, but she was confused. Not that way…damn! He could be behind her for all she knew. She turned again. The sky was filled with incoming Marines; a few blue-tops clung to station rigging or used handheld jets of some kind to propel themselves along the station’s length toward one of the airlocks. Earth was enormous, a blue-white arc across half the sky. Over her headset, she could hear the crackling calls of her Marines.
“Wheeoo! Comin’ in!”
“Watch it, Sandy! Bad guy on your four o’clock!”
“I got him!”
“I’m down! Ortega on target!”
“Help me! This is Kelly! I’ve got a malfunction! Someone help me!”
She looked around for Private Kelly but couldn’t see him. The battle was a tangle of confusion, with unfamiliar shapes and movement in unexpected directions. She had an excellent vantage point, midway along the length of the ISS, somewhere in the vicinity, she thought, of the computer module. The station’s keel—a massive structure of zigzagging struts and long, aluminum beams supporting the modules—was just over that way…and she could see the great, black wings of the solar panels when they eclipsed the glare of the sun.
That gave Fuentes her bearings, and she started moving toward the station keel.
Other Marines around her were doing the same, their active camo armor showing odd, almost abstract designs of black and white. The camo, she thought, worked well in space; it was hard to recognize anything human in those shapes, though the MMUs, which were not camouflaged, provided anchor points for the eye that helped her pick out individual features like helmets, gloves, or ATARs.
Several Marines, she saw, had reached the station dead, their armor torn open, a frosting of frozen water or atmosphere forming around gaping entry or exit holes. Others had missed the station and were receding into the black void beyond. She called up a visual on her platoon life-support readouts. It looked like five dead out of twenty-two…not good, but not as bad as it could have been, and there was always the tiny but defiant hope that some of those listed as dead were alive, but with damaged transmitters.
“Eagle, this is Marine One,” she called. “We’re down to eighteen effectives, but we’re on the station. Can you clarify the tacsit, over?”
“Ah, copy that, One. Sorry, it looks like a real furball from here. Can’t see much of anything.”
“Rog.” It was up to the Marines, then. Up to her.
As she rounded the curve of the station module, she spotted a blue-helmet clinging to the rigging in the distance. It was impossible, she found, to estimate ranges. Things seemed closer in vacuum, without the slight haze of an atmosphere to give subconscious clues to distance. No matter. She didn’t even need to check the range on her HUD. Combat here was strictly point and shoot.
A patch of the station hull a few meters away suddenly and silently acquired a bright silver smudge; a bullet had just grazed the structure’s outer skin. She dragged her ATAR around until the crosshairs were centered on the enemy, then squeezed the trigger. Recoil bumped her back, setting her adrift from the station as the UN soldier flung his arms out and lost his rifle as he drifted clear of the station rigging.
She used her MMU to stop her backward drift, then accelerate forward again. She skimmed past the station hull, her boots centimeters above the white-painted surface. She saw several more UN bodies, some drifting equipment, but no more active targets.
“Marine One, this is Eagle,” crackled in her headset. “It looks like you’ve got ’em on the run. We can see five…no, six blue-tops making for an airlock at the Alfa end. Looks like you’ve got ’em bottled up.”
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