James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

The four attackers bounced through engineering like grasshoppers, massive bodies crashing into walls and consoles, shearing off bits of the bulkhead where they scraped against it. At this point, their best hope was that the enemy force would beat itself to death against the walls. Bull pulled back toward the entryway to the drum, then took a position behind a crate and started firing at the enemy, trying to draw them toward him. If he could get the enemy out into the habitation drum, he might be able to close down the transition point and make the bastards dig back through. It might even give Naomi the minutes she needed.

The people in power armor didn’t seem to notice he was there. One caught a desk, the steel bending in the suit’s glove, and started pulling hand over hand toward the reactor controls.

“Can anybody stop that guy?” Bull asked. No one on the frequency answered. He sighed. “Naomi. You got to leave now.”

“Core’s out. I can drop the grid too. Just a few more minutes.”

“You don’t have them. Come out now, and I’ll try to get you back in when things cool down.”

“But—”

“You’re no good to anyone dead,” he said. The channel went quiet, and for a long moment he thought the Belter had been caught, been killed. Then she came sailing out of the hallway, leading with her chin, her good arm and hair streaming behind her like stabilizing fins. The nearest of the people in power suits grabbed at her, but she was already gone, and they were too timid to try jumping after her.

Bull saw another of the enemy struggling with something. A gun. The massive glove was too thick to fit through the weapon’s trigger guard. As Bull watched, the enemy snapped the guard off and settled the gun in its fist, like a child’s toy carried by a large man. Bull fired at it a few more times without much hope of doing damage.

Four Earthers shouted with one voice and launched themselves at the one with the gun. The attacker didn’t fire. Just swept one big metal arm through the air, scattering Bull’s people like they were sparrows.

His people were going to get killed—were getting killed—and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Okay kids,” he said. “Let’s pack up and go home. It’s getting too hot in here.”

“Bull!” Verbinski shouted. “Watch your six!”

Bull tried to swivel in the mech, but something hit him hard in the back. The magnetic feet creaked and lost their grip, and he was floating. The world all around began to shimmer gold and blue as his consciousness slipped away. He was aware distantly of a hand on his shoulder, slowing his fall, and he saw Naomi’s face. Something had scraped her cheek, and she had a long bubble of blood clinging to her skin. He tried to turn and failed. That was right. No spine. He should have remembered that.

“What?” he said.

“They cut us off from the drum,” Naomi said and turned him so that his mech’s feet could touch deck. The air was a debris field. Twists of metal and shattered ceramic, sprays of blood slowly coalescing and growing larger like planets forming out of dust. Electricity arced from the ruins of a control panel, and the shattered glass floated in the tiny play of lightning. Two of the people in power armor stood rooted by the passage to the transition point. One held a rifle by the barrel as a club, the other had pistols with the trigger guard snapped off in either hand. A third was flailing in the air just above the maintenance shaft that they’d arrived through, struggling to get purchase on something. The fourth was shuffling across the deck toward them, its movements deliberate and controlled to keep from kicking off into the air.

“Elevator shaft airlock,” Bull said. “Fall back.”

“Everyone,” Naomi said into her hand terminal. “We’re falling back to the elevator shaft on my go. Go!”

Naomi pulled him around, then attached herself to his back in rescue hold and jumped. The enemy’s guns opened fire. Bull caught a glimpse of a woman just as a bullet passed through her leg. Saw the grimace on her face and the blood fountaining out of her. I’m sorry , he thought.

The wall of the elevator shaft airlock loomed up, and Naomi pushed off from him, landing on the bulkhead with the grace of a woman born to zero g. Two more bodies came through the space, Martian marines, both of them. He recognized the man called Juarez and the woman named Cass. Naomi slapped the controls and the airlock doors began to collapse. Just as the opening seemed too narrow for a human form, two more came through. Sergeant Verbinski and a man from Bull’s side of the security force schism.

Bull’s head was swimming. He felt like he’d just run twenty miles in the hot New Mexican sun. He clapped his hands together less to command the attention of the people in the lock and more to bring himself back to awareness.

“That shaft’s in vacuum,” he said. “If that’s the way we’re going, we need to get suited up. Lockers are over there. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with.” A massive blow rang against the airlock door. Then another. “Might want to hurry,” he said.

“You aren’t going to fit,” Verbinski said. “Not with that contraption.”

“Yeah,” Bull said. “Okay.”

“Come on, big boy,” the sergeant said. “Let’s get you out of that.”

No , Bull wanted to say. I’m all right . But Juarez and the other marine were already shucking him out of his brace, then out of the mech that Sam had made for him. He was a cripple again. That wasn’t true. He’d been crippled ever since the catastrophe. Now he just had one fewer tool.

He’d worked with less.

The banging on the airlock door was getting louder, more intense. Along with the impact, there was something that sounded like tearing. He imagined the powered armor picking up handfuls of steel between massive fingers and pulling back, ripping at the skin of the ship. He clambered over to his mech, his body flowing out behind him, useless as a kite. He popped open the storage and took what was left of his pistol’s ammunition and his hand terminal. For a moment, he didn’t recognize the flat black package that he took out next. And then he did.

“If we’re not staying, we’d best leave,” Verbinski said.

“Let’s go,” Bull said, pushing the grenades into the pouch on the EVA suit’s thigh.

Naomi cycled the door to the shaft. The sounds of the attack grew fainter and farther away as the air leaked out, and then the shaft was open below them. A full kilometer’s fall to the trapped elevator, and then another past that to… what? Ashford? Certain death? Bull didn’t know anymore what he was running from. Or to.

One by one, they pushed off, pulling themselves through the vacuum. Verbinski and the security man, Naomi and the marine, then Bull and Juarez. Without discussing it, they’d all paired off with someone who wasn’t theirs. In Bull’s sagging mind, that seemed important.

“Juarez?” Verbinski said on the radio, and Bull was surprised to hear his voice.

“Sir.”

“If you get a good shot, you think you could crack the visors on those suits?”

“Your suit, maybe,” Juarez said. “I keep mine in pretty good condition.”

“Do your best,” Verbinski said.

Bull felt it when the enemy force breached the airlock. He couldn’t even say what it was exactly. Some little press of a shock wave, a whisper-thin breath of atmosphere. He looked down past his dead feet, and there was light at the bottom of the shaft where there shouldn’t have been. There were probably about a thousand safety measures slamming down in engineering right now. He hoped so. Far below, he saw a muzzle flash, but they were so far ahead, the bullet almost certainly hit the sides of the shaft and spent itself before it could reach them.