Chapter 12
Dexter
The first boarding pod hits Hull Section Nine like a fist through wet paper, and the whole station screams.
The second pod punches through forty meters starboard of the first. Then the third. Then four more in rapid succession, and the station's voice becomes a sustained howl of shearing metal and ruptured pressure seals.
"Shield failure at points seven, twelve, and nineteen." Zane's voice in my earpiece is the only calm thing left in the universe. "Boarding pods confirmed in sections nine, fourteen, and twenty-two. Dexter, you have incoming in your quadrant."
I'm already moving. My team, twelve soldiers and four armed debtors who proved themselves in the drills, fall in behind me without needing the order.
The corridor lights have shifted to emergency red, turning everything the color of an open wound, and the air tastes different already.
Sharper. The pressure seals are holding in this section, but somewhere nearby they're not, and the station's atmospheric systems are compensating by pushing harder through every functioning vent.
"Copy. Moving to intercept in Section Nine." I pull my sidearm, check the charge by feel, holster it again. Close quarters in station corridors means the rifle comes first, sidearm for backup. "How many pods?"
"Seven confirmed. More incoming." A pause that lasts exactly one breath too long. "Hull integrity is degrading faster than projected. They're hitting us with shaped charges before the pods. Softening the shell."
Smart. The Vex learned something since their last station assault. Or they hired someone who knows how Veridian-7 is built.
"Talia's running debtor network analysis," Zane continues. "She's flagged six individuals with probable Vex sympathies in critical zones. I'm rerouting security to contain."
Talia St. Laurent. I still don't fully understand what she is to my brother, but I understand what she does for him, and right now that's enough.
She sees the station's social architecture the way I see combat geometry.
If there are traitors waiting to open doors from the inside, she'll find them before the hinges move.
"Dexter." Zane's voice drops half a register, which means what he's about to say matters more than the rest. "Sector Seven is your priority. If they breach the main corridor, they have a straight line to life support. Everything else we can lose and recover. Not that."
I pull up the station schematic in my mind. Sector Seven. A long corridor with limited cover, two maintenance junctions, and a reinforced bulkhead at the far end that leads to the atmospheric processing core. It's the station's throat. You cut that, the body dies.
"Understood. We'll hold it."
"You'll hold it." Not a question. Not encouragement. A statement of fact from the man who's sent me into worse and watched me walk out.
I cut the comm channel to tactical only and pick up the pace. My team matches without complaint. Behind us, somewhere deep in the station's guts, an explosion blooms, muffled by distance and deck plating but felt in the slight shudder that runs through the floor.
The Vex are already inside.
We reach Sector Seven in four minutes. It takes another two for the Vex to find us there.
I use those six minutes the way they deserve.
Barricades from maintenance supplies. Sight lines mapped.
Fields of fire assigned. The two debtors with demolitions experience wire the first maintenance junction with proximity charges.
Nothing fancy. Enough to slow a push and shred the first bodies through the door.
My team is quiet. Focused. The kind of fear that makes people sharp instead of stupid, and I'm grateful for it.
These aren't Torrence family soldiers, not most of them.
They're station security, a few hired contractors, the debtors who chose to fight rather than hide. None of them signed up for a siege.
They're here anyway.
I position myself at the center of the corridor, behind a barricade of welded cargo containers, and I open the part of my mind that I keep leashed in polite company.
The Empri ability isn't telepathy. People always get that wrong.
It's more like reading a language written in muscle tension and micro-expressions and the electrical field of a nervous system running hot.
When someone is about to shoot, their body knows before their conscious mind gives the order.
I read the body. In close quarters, with enemies I can see, it means I know where the violence is going half a second before it arrives.
Half a second is a lifetime in a firefight.
The first wave comes through the Section Nine junction, fifteen Vex soldiers in matte-black tactical gear, their faces hidden behind rebreather masks that make them look like insects. They move well. Coordinated. Covering formation as they advance into the corridor.
I read the point man before he clears the doorway. His weight shifts left. He's going to sweep right. I put three rounds into the space his chest will occupy, and he walks into them like I hung them in the air for him.
The corridor erupts.
Muzzle flash in the red emergency lighting creates a strobe effect that turns everything into frozen frames of violence.
My people fire from cover. The Vex return fire and advance.
The first proximity charge detonates when three of them crowd the maintenance junction, and the concussion wave rolls down the corridor with a pressure I feel in my sinuses.
Two minutes. Three. The first wave breaks against our position and leaves five bodies on the deck plating. The survivors pull back, dragging their wounded, and I use the lull to check my team.
One dead. Koren, a station security officer with seventeen years on Veridian-7 and a daughter in the residential ring who will learn about this in a few hours. A chest wound, clean through the armor's weak point at the shoulder junction. She bled out before anyone reached her.
Two wounded. Functional, but diminished.
"They're regrouping." Lev, one of the debtors, a young man with the kind of steady hands that made me trust him with the second barricade position. He's watching the junction through his scope. "I count twenty more. They're bringing something heavy."
I see it through the junction gap when the next formation begins to move. A breaching ram, military-grade, the kind designed to punch through reinforced bulkheads. If they get that to the life support door at the far end of this corridor, the bulkhead won't hold.
"Zane. They're escalating in Seven. Breaching equipment. I need reinforcements."
Static. Then: "Everyone's committed. Sections Nine and Fourteen are both under heavy assault. I'll get you what I can, but it won't be fast."
Not fast might mean not at all. The math starts itself without my permission.
Sixteen hostiles visible, likely more behind them.
My team is down to thirteen effective fighters.
The corridor is fifty meters long with limited lateral movement.
If they push with the ram, we have to stop it before it reaches the midpoint, or the momentum carries it through regardless of casualties.
Thirty percent chance of holding if they commit everything.
I kill the calculation before it finishes. Thirty percent or three hundred, we hold this corridor or the station suffocates.
"Copy. We'll manage."
The second wave hits harder. They come with the ram in the center, six soldiers bearing it like pallbearers carrying the ugliest coffin ever built, with ten more providing suppressive fire on either side.
The noise is annihilating. Ricochets scream off the cargo containers.
One of my people takes a round in the leg and goes down cursing.
I lean out of cover and read the formation. The ram team is disciplined, but they're vulnerable at the transition points where the corridor narrows. I call targets. My people fire. Two of the ram carriers drop, and the whole formation stutters.
They don't stop.
The ram keeps coming, four soldiers now, straining under the redistributed weight, and behind them the suppressive fire intensifies to a wall of sound and light that keeps my people's heads down.
I sight on the lead carrier and put two rounds into his knee. He folds. The ram lurches, tips, hits the deck plating with a sound like a bell made of nightmares. The remaining three carriers scramble, and for a moment the formation is chaos.
We pour fire into the gap. Four more Vex drop. The rest pull back, leaving the ram stranded in the middle of the corridor like a beached cetacean, and I allow myself one breath of relief before I hear the sound that ends it.
Boots. Dozens of them. Coming from the Section Nine junction. The third wave, and this one is bigger than the first two combined.
"Zane. Third wave incoming. Double the numbers." My voice is flat, which is the voice that means I've already accepted what's about to happen and moved past it into the clean space of pure function. "If you have anything to send, send it now."
Silence for two heartbeats. Then Zane, not flat, not calm, but controlled in the way that means he's moving pieces on a board only he can see: "Hold for three minutes. Help is coming."
Three minutes.
I reload. Redistribute my people. Push the two most wounded to the rear. Set the remaining proximity charge at the corridor's narrowest point and arm it for manual detonation, because I want to choose the moment.
The third wave comes, and it is everything.
Thirty soldiers. Forty. The corridor fills with them, a tide of black tactical gear and muzzle flash, and my team fires and fires and it's not enough. The Vex push through our fire by sheer numbers, stepping over their own dead, and the barricade position begins to collapse.