Atmospheric Work Area. Extreme Caution Advised.
All employees operate at their own risk.
- Corpus Warning Sign
"Up, up, up!"
The crew bundled towards ladders; boots clanging on steel decking. Kelpo focused on one rung at a time; the sound of his breathing huge in the confines of the respirator mask Stren had hastily shoved his way. The mask was a sorry, weatherworn hand-me-down; visibly patched in places. The smell of burnt plastic and sour sweat was overwhelming.
Kelpo followed the first man out; his vision little more than a narrow slip of glass that threatened to fog over any second. All he could see were the boots of the man ahead of him. Above, he heard roared challenges. Close range plasma discharge. Another rung. The flamer danged loose on its strap; slapping against his thigh and clanging whenever it caught the edge of the ladder. The final rung now, then the narrow pressure channel that marked the end of the climb. He squeezed through the hatchway.
And was suddenly blinded. The pink swirling light of the Venusian sky stabbed deep into his eyes. Even this far in a terraformed zone, the wind speed proved savage at this altitude; whipping against him and threatening to blow him away outright.
Kelpo swore and stumbled as he exited the ladder, tumbling face down onto the deck.
It saved his life. A plasma cutter raked the air where his head should have been.
Kelpo rolled onto his back, hands blindly fumbling for the flamer. He triggered it accidentally.
The burst of liquid fire enveloped the hijacker before him in a single jet. He went up like a bonfire; thrashing and shrieking. A plasma bolt smashed the man off his feet, where he tumbled over the edge of the hull and mercifully out of sight.
Stren appeared in Kelpo's visor, a smoking Detron in his hands; eyes bulging through the visor of his rebreather.
"On your feet lad! Gotta clear 'em off!"
With that Stren gripped Kelpo by the webbing, hauling him to his feet.
"Harness; harness; go!"
Hands trembling, senses overloaded, Kelpo found the grapple-line on the front of his environment suit and latched the hook onto the safety. Cinched it tight. Too tight. He went to move and it almost wrenched him off his feet. Stren snarled and fussed over him like a concerned aunt; fixing Kelpo's rig for him. Stren slapped his shoulder.
"Now! With me, lad!"
They staggered across the hull; bowed against the howling wind. A fierce melee had broken out across the top of the hull. Anything went in a barge fight. Rifles, sidearms; crude axes and plasma cutters. A no holds barred frenzy of headbutts, machetes and screams.
Their attackers favoured jump packs and mag boots. This was effective for an initial assault; allowing them to accurately seed themselves across the hull, but made their movement slow and clunky. The crew of the Severance by contrast clung to the ship with grapple lines; making them more nimble as they slid expertly around the hull, but frightfully vulnerable.
Kelpo watched as one of the Severance crew smashed an assaulter on to his back; trying to fall on the man with a knife. The assaulter snarled and simply slashed the harness line in return; planting a mag-boot in the man's chest. The wind did the rest; snatching him up and away without so much as a shout.
Stren let out a muffled howl in anger, throwing himself forward and sliding across the sloping surface of the hull on his rump; the Detron spitting in one hand; the other expertly feeding the grapple-line. He moved with frightening speed despite his size. Kelpo did his best to keep up, stumbling and thrashing as his line continued to catch. He was a surface scavenger. Altitude work was all too new to him.
A burst of light in the sky caught Kelpo's eye. More jump-packs; descending from on high. They filled the sky. Stern saw them too, opened his throat and bellowed:
"Incoming!"
Assaulters descended in a storm of shouts and clattering metal.
Something smashed into Kelpo, driving him off his feet. He lost the flamer; where, he couldn't tell. Suddenly he was on his back, an assaulter leering over him; a knee pressed into Kelpo's chest. Crushing the air out of his lungs. A Prova spat in his face; inches from Kelpo's faceplate.
Kelpo Marr saw red. He was not a tall man, but not a soft one either; had been a surface scavver all his life. Rock climbing and mountaineering had left him lean but well-muscled; shoulders broad and strong. On a purely physical level, Kelpo was not a man to pick a fight with lightly.
He smashed his faceplate forwards so hard he cracked his own visor. The assaulter stumbled back; his own helmet askew. The weight on Kelpo shifted. Then Kelpo was on him, smashing his fist into the man's respirator again and again; denting the housing where the air-tubes circled up into the man's boxy helm. Hissing atmosphere sprayed out, blinding Kelp. He didn't stop; relentless.
A pair of hands pulled him back.
"Easy boy! He's done! He's done."
It was Stren. He was right too. The body beneath Kelpo lay broken and still; his faceplate a dented wreck. Kelpo wheeled about, still in a frenzy; amped on an adrenal surge so intense it felt electric. He drank in the brawl, chest sucking air into screaming lungs.
More and more assaulters rained down upon the Severance. The Forward Transaction had gone all in on the attack; abandoning weapon stations and non-essential systems: committing every body they possibly had to the assault. They would take the Severance and its cargo, or die trying. Even veterans like Stren had never seen an assault of its like before.
"Back, fall back!" Stren bellowed, waving at his men. He might as well have ordered the wind to stop. There was no orchestrating this mess. Not now.
Kelpo watched a third wave of fighters blaze in through the sky. A final push, to finally overwhelm the Severance's dogged but beleaguered resistance.
A coursing surge of electricity caught the assaulters mid-air; arcing from one to the next. Jump packs exploded or simply shorted out entirely. Tumbling bodies bounced off the hull like meaty rain drops, before scattering into the wind.
Kael had emerged from below deck; tethered to the hull by a force unknown. He lowered his hand; tendrils of power still flitting from one finger to the next.
One ill-fated assaulter rushed him; swinging a plasma torch. Kael grabbed his wrist, snapped it with a flick of his thumb; before finishing the man with a final surging jolt. Volt calmly removed the torch from the man's grasp, before letting the wind steal him away. The assaulters froze in their tracks; stricken with the realisation that the cargo they so desperately sought had now come for them instead.
Volt looked over at Kelpo and Stern; the cutter held low at his side. He nodded to the hatch behind him, once.
The message was clear.
"Everybody back; clear out!" Stren roared.
The Severance's crew scrambled back behind the Warframe, retrieving their wounded as they broke free of the melee. Stren and Kelpo didn't stick around the watch the ensuing slaughter. They heard it begin as they sealed the hatches behind them; shutting out the shrieks and the surging crackle of eldritch power.
"Boarding Deck, what's your status?" Teico asked. Telin and the rest of the bridge crew waited with baited breath. They had heard the muffled bangs and screams across the hull.
Stren's voice filtered out through the bridge, on loud speaker; ragged and breathless.
"Tenno has 'em now. Poor buggers. What's the word?"
"Short Position is closing fast. Stay on the Transaction, we're rigging the Boarding Gate now."
"Right. Not a whole lot of us fighting fit up here."
Telin was already on his feet.
"I'm enroute."
Telin made a single stop on his way to the Boarding Gate; following a tracking signal on his wrist unit as he wound his way through the ship.
HWK-44 had been left in secure storage; just another trophy seized on the frontier. Its engine was still dented from its scrap deep beneath the ice. The drone had been fitted with a restraining clamp; which popped free with the slightest tug.
The drone shivered to life; then warbled at him cheerfully as it slid into the shoulder mount of Telin's hard-suit.
"Good to see you too, buddy. We've got work to do."
It is perhaps to the credit of the crew of the Forward Transaction that the majority of them did not surrender outright when the Tenno fell upon them. They rushed him from all sides, fully committed to the end. This was understandable. One did not shirk from an Exchange contract and expect to live a long or happy life.
Kael shortened it for them. He held a plasma cutter in each hand now; the fizzling torches whirling and snapping as he flowed through them; scattering broken bodies left and right. Volt slashed one torch across the face of an onrushing hijacker; dropping the torch and spinning the man around by his webbing; absorbing a storm of incoming shots intended for the Frame beyond. Volt snatched a kitgun from the dead man's webbing; whipping it free as the body tumbled aside. A hair trigger beam repeater; colloquially dubbed a Flutterfire.
Kael tested the name; ripping a bevy shots into the oncoming scavvers. The power cell glowed red hot and he cast it aside; meeting the rest of them hand to hand. Fists moved as blurs. Bones broke. An elbow here; a jolt of sparking power there. They fell in droves.
Volt whirled about, looking for the next opponent. None came.
The hull was scabbed with stray plasma fire; but was eerily empty; but for the occasional tethered body here and there; where the fallen were still held in place by mooring lines or a stray mag-boot. The few surviving assaulters had simply leapt overboard; hoping against hope that their jump packs would be enough to arrest their descent to the burning colony below. The Tenno never saw what became of them.
Volt looked out to port. The Short Position was closing fast; cannons inert, its intentions clear. It meant to attempt a boarding of its own. Kael had no intention of allowing that. He crossed the hull quickly; stopping to retrieve a wicked machete from the webbing of one of the fallen. The blade pointed downwards in one fist, the plasma cutter in the other; the Frame crouched low, readied himself.
There was a surge of power. Volt sprinted: lightning fast; faster even than the howling wind. Kael leapt; sailing through the air; his syndana whipping around him as he spun through the air; the Void itself guiding his trajectory. Kael saw the widening eyes of the Short Position's bridge crew, moments before he impacted.
The leap had been at the very limits the Tenno could make; even with the Void behind him. He barely made it.
It was not a clean landing. The plasma cutter failed to connect; all but imploding in his hand as it smashed against the hull; tumbling from his grasp. The machete bit deep, arresting his fall one-handed. For a heart stopping moment, the Warframe clung on, scrabbling for purchase; before he finally dug his fingertips into a seam of plating and managed to claw his way further onto the hull; abandoning the machete behind him.
The crew of the Severance never saw what befell the crew inside the Short Position. All they registered on their scopes was the smaller barge breaking off; desperately trying to shake their new stowaway. Then their scanners registered heated weapons fire; an extreme power surge, and then a series of smaller, internal detonations.
Then nothing.
Through the rear view cams, Teico watched the Short Position angle upwards, on a new trajectory; trailing fire and ugly smoke from its belly.
It began to loop around; angling about on a new heading.
The Boarding Gate was a very genteel term for what was ultimately the barge's equivalent of a siege tower: a snarling, toothed drill rig which extended from the hull and lanced deep into the flank of enemy ships.
Telin found Kelpo crouched outside it; attended by Stren and two of the other crew. He was getting his hand hastily bandaged.
"What happened to you?"
"Lad did good." Stren clapped him on the shoulder like a proud father.
Kelpo held up his mangled fingers.
"Broke my hand."
"Fug. Sit this one out."
Kelpo shook his head.
"We need every man we can get."
"Boarding team!" Stren's voice was a hoarse rasp now. "Thirty seconds!"
Less than twelve of them stood ready; bloodied, battered and bruised. They banged fresh tanks into chemical throwers; readied knives and low calibre breaching weapons; energy-shotguns for the most part. They doffed their environment masks; replacing them with ear protectors and bowl-shaped helmets; buckling on less bulky respirators intended only for emergencies. Telin noticed that more than one of the crew had historic chemical burns marks of their own. Ship to ship fighting was sweaty, brutal affair. He steeled himself.
The cables finished winching the Severance alongside the Transaction. There came a thumping bang. Then the drill cut in; spearing into the Transaction with an ear-splitting metallic shriek. The deck vibrated with the bone rattling force; as plasma cutters dotted along the Board Gate's seared to life; adding to the sawing frenzy. The noise was deafening.
Deck plating tumbled inwards. Automatic launchers spat all manner of flash-bangs, smoke grenades and concussion charges into the breach. Smoke tumbled back up the drill corridor, twisting and whirling.
Telin and Stren looked at each other; primed to barrel into the mist.
"Stop! Stop! Enough!" a voice cried through the tumbling smoke. "We surrender!"
Captain Leonid Sobil and his bridge crew filed out, choking and spluttering; hands high in the air. More followed; thoroughly cowed. They had witnessed the slaughter of their comrades first hand. The prisoners outnumbered them almost three to one.
Sobil kept his back straight, expression tight.
"Who is in charge here?"
Stren looked at Kelpo. Kelpo looked at Stren.
They both looked at Telin.
"I… uh… accept your surrender." Telin shrugged, offering the man an uncertain salute.
Sobil returned it, nodding impatiently. Sweat beaded his brow.
"Yes, yes, yes – just keep that bloody thing away from us."
Kael-as-Volt sat in the scorched bridge of the Short Position, the airship's control yoke rattling in his hands. He tried the com again. It too was fried. He may have gotten carried away.
He tried transmitting from the Frame directly.
"Severance, this is Kael, respond."
Nothing. The ship plating was playing havoc with the atmospherics.
Even so, a new voice answered him. One he had not heard in centuries.
"Quite the show you're putting on, Stranger." Kael could hear the smile in Sara's voice. "I just lost a bet."
A jolt ran through Kael sharper than any Void charge.
"Sara! What are you doing here?!"
"Was meant to rescuing you, but got a little… uh, side-tracked. Look, there's a million things I want to say but we've no time. There's a revolution to be had. Game?"
Kael wrestled with the control stick. Controls were sluggish, but little by little, he adjusted course.
Watch Control swam into view.
The altimeter plummeted with each passing second.
"Inbound."