CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
AIDEN
With a team of eighteen people behind me, I stared at the map on my comm, waiting with strictly controlled patience until everyone was in place.
I could see Bryce’s team gathered at the far end of the hallway, just out of sight of the pirates.
Behind me, Carver was ready to go, her makeshift weapon of a large wrench in her hand.
Bryce’s team were clustering up at the corner, ready to create a distraction.
As we watched, the little green dots that indicated the pirates began to move slowly towards Bryce’s group.
“You there! Come back here,” one of them called out, then the group began moving faster towards the end of the hallway. That was our cue.
I peered carefully around the corner, wary of anyone being a diligent soldier and maintaining a rear guard.
But the group had likely become too relaxed in the knowledge that most of us were safely locked away in the storage crates, and so they probably thought they would only be dealing with a small group, two or three stragglers who had escaped from previous scuffles.
Carver and I took point, swinging around the corner and propelling ourselves along the hand rails to float silently along the hall.
We kept going, pulling ourselves faster, before finally pushing off to soar the last dozen metres or so.
The rest of our team would be filling the hallway behind us, ready to overwhelm the pirates with sheer numbers.
As I floated along, I picked out a likely target.
He was Anicrian, with his back turned to me and his weapon raised, though he was currently letting those in front of him investigate the small noises that Bryce’s group were making – sounds that suggested an ambush in the making, but were actually designed purely to get their attention.
I spun at the last minute, flipping over so my legs were going first, then I latched onto the Anicrian, my legs clasping around his waist, the hammer in my hand slamming down onto his head with heavy blows.
I gritted my teeth and tried not to think about what I was doing.
I’d killed plenty of people in my military career, but there was a stark difference between shooting someone with a laser gun and bludgeoning them to death with a hammer.
I struck him three times in quick succession, hearing a sickening crack on the third blow, then I yanked his hand towards me, neatly grabbing the laser gun out of his fist and firing at the pirates in front of me.
I’d taken out two of them before they knew what was happening, and by then, Carver had successfully disarmed her own target, and she took out one more.
Three more soldiers surged past us, tackling more of the pirates.
But the one Carver had attacked wasn’t dead, though he was certainly stunned, and he flailed about, yelling incoherently.
I swung around, using the railing on the wall as leverage, and shot him in the head.
A stream of blood floated out of his head and up towards the ceiling, and I cringed.
That was going to be an unpleasant side effect of fighting in zero gravity; any stray item or drop of fluid would just float about, randomly bumping into walls or splattering over any surface it came into contact with.
By the time this was over, the ship was going to need a full scale decontamination.
Down at the end of the hallway, Bryce was grappling with the last pirate, not yet having managed to disarm him, so I lined up my gun, waited for a clear shot, then fired.
The laser beam shimmered down the hallway, slicing a neat hole through the pirate’s chest. I didn’t think it had been quite accurate enough to kill him, but I’d been more concerned about not accidentally killing Bryce in the process, and the shock and pain of it was enough to give Bryce an opportunity to wrench the gun out of the pirate’s hand, turn it on the pirate, and shoot him in the head.
That left Bryce untethered to any kind of anchor point, and he spun head over heels, up towards the ceiling. Thankfully, one of the others in his group managed to reach up and grab his ankle, halting his spin and pulling him back down to the floor.
The couple of privates in the group were looking a little green, as their gazes wandered over the now lifeless bodies floating in the hallway, like a scene out of a horror movie, while globules of blood drifted around them.
The rest of us simply compartmentalised the carnage, as we’d been taught, and moved on to the next objective.
“Search them,” Bryce ordered the team. “Take any weapons. Hand them to the more senior officers first. Next target is…” His head snapped up, almost destabilising him from his perch by the railing.
“This way! One group chasing another,” he added, glancing at his map again, and I hastily checked mine.
Sure enough, there was a group of five green dots, moving rapidly down a hallway, with another group of four dots following at a short distance.
“My bet is those are the rest of the missing crew,” Bryce said, as he pushed off the wall, heading in that direction.
“Let’s go and piss off the guys chasing them. ”