GRRRRR gonna havve to fix the editing on this, got screwed when I saved

p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"What a day it had been. Totally normal morning routine: PT in the hangar, weapons check, posting the watch bill for today's guard duties, then drill and ceremonies for some Covies, and now here she was, strapped into the back of a Pelican, about to do a boarding action. And boarding actions emsucked/em./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"She ran her hands across her MA5C rifle, checking its safety, that there was a round in the chamber, and that the underslung shotgun was loaded. Assured that everything was in the right place, she turned on the platoon radio. The four pelicans could only fit one platoon of Breaker company, Breaker 2 happened to be on watch when general quarters sounded. She didn't want to step on the Breaker 2's CO's toes too much, Lieutenant Jurgens, but he knew he wouldn't take it too poorly./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Alright marines, I cannot stress this enough, do emnot/em shoot emany/em Grunts aboard the target, we are here to emsave them/em. Jackals are weapons free, but Grunts are emoff limits/em." "But Major," chimed in some smartass from second squad, "I'm fighting six years of muscle memory!" "Can it marine!" barked Sergeant Shahed, Breaker 2's chief NCO, "you're swabbing the deck for three days when we get back to Vicky!"/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Every marine knew better than to hotmike and actually chuckle on TEAMCOM, but she could see them laughing in their EVA rig up and down the benches of the pelican. She smiled, emtake your job seriously, but don't be so uptight you shoot everything that moves/em. All the marines were checking their equipment, hollowpoints, shotguns, flashbangs, everything a marine needed to storm a hostile ship, a fight that often looked more like a bar brawl with EVA equipment than a military operation. emGood thing Jackals have hollow bones/em. Each marine bristled with knives, flash bang grenades, and pistols on both chest and thigh rigs./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Bipzam, the Grunt in charge of translating, spoke to them on TEAMCOM. "A ship that size oughtta have about 50 crew. It'll be hot and might not have atmosphere or gravity after getting its engines shot off."/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"span style="mso-spacerun: yes;" /spanLitvak had mixed feelings about Bipzam. On the one hand, she would be an invaluable tactical and cultural resource, on the other, her marines would have to share the limited hangar space with her and her staff, and she knew that would cause tension./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Roger, Bipzam. Marines, try and link up with Shipmaster's Elites as fast as possible, they'll be able to talk to the Grunts. If a Grunt freaks out and tries to hit you, just bop them on the head." "Nonlethally, of course," interrupted Jurgens. "Nonlethally," Litvak echoed with a smile./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Don't fuck this into a cocked hat, marines" shouted Sergeant Shahed, "it's day one on our new job." "If you hit a hingehead on accident," Jurgens chimed in with his intolerable Minnesota accent, "it'll probably eat ya!"/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Litvak smiled but felt uneasy. Elites in general, obviously genocidal maniacs, but the Shipmaster and the two she had met so far were decent. Made her worry that more Elites might be decent beings, perhaps even a plurality. Harrowing thought./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Standby to standby, marines," said the Pelican pilot, "'bout to turn off the gravity and dock." Jurgens astutely muted teamcom to head off a volley of docking jokes. The Pelican shuddered, Elsa turned on her HUD, as the extendable airlock package attached to the cargo bay, vacuum-sealed to the raider's hull, and began to pressurize. "Marines standby for circularization burn." Elsa rocked in her seat, inertia forcing her from one side to another as the four Pelicans burned to move the raider from a trajectory ending in a crash on Balaho to a circular one around the miserable iceball./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"emMiserable, but home to 320 million thinking and feeling beings/em, her conscience reminded her, vestigial organ that it was, emwho your job over the next twelve months is to bleed and kill to save./em/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Gerard says our orbit is good," reported the Pelican pilot, "and Cap gives greenlight to board." The Pelican's cargo door opened, and the jump light turned green as Elsa unbuckled her harness and drifted to the exposed patch of the raider's hull./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Covie ships had 3D scanners, able to tell what the internal structure of a ship was, and Shipmaster had told Captain Mifune where to dock the Pelicans in order to make the burn and convenient entry./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Make a hole!" she said on teamcom as a corporal with the breaching charge made her way to the raider's mirror hull and laid it out, just wide enough for the largest regulation marine in EVA rig to ingress. She closed the Pelican's blast doors, denotated the charge with a emwhump/em, and then dropped the door. Litvak ordered Jurgens to stay behind and coordinate the breaching efforts as she followed the squad, Breaker 2-1, into the bowels of the raider./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Judging from the bits of bone and purplish blood floating around the room and smeared on the walls, a Jackal must've been standing too close to the breaching charge when it went off. A three-fingered forearm drifting across her field of vision confirmed it. The ship was dark, her helmet readouts informed her that it was an uncomfortable 40 degrees centigrade aboard the dark, gravityless vessel. They'd breached at some kind of maintenance access point, with the corridors of the ship extending only in one direction. emDamn good spot to board an enemy ship/em, she thought, emArbiter's kid /ememreally knows his shit./em/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Breaker 2, go dark, NVG's and IR lasers only. Let's keep them confused." The three status lights of the squad commanders blinked green in affirmation. Breaker 2-1 spread out, slowly drifting down the hall, all but one staying in place, braced against the wall, rifles pointed down as the rearmost marine in line drifted down the corridor to become the first in line. They leapfrogged down the hall until they reached a junction. Breaker 2-1's sergeant, a humorless man named Zhang, snaked a fiber optic cable around the corners, checking to see if things were clear before moving out. All clear./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Zhang issued orders to his three fireteam leaders. Alpha team would stay back and protect the Pelican, Bravo would accompany Zhang, and Charlie would go with the Major./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Charlie team's corporal was drifting over to Litvak when teamcom radio blared "Contact! Contact!" as the sound of automatic weapons fire and shotgun blasts rang down the corridors. Breaker 2-1 scrambled to take firing positions. Boarding actions were violent, encounters came with zero warning, and were over in seconds. You had to rely on impulse, thinking got you killed./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"After thirty agonizing seconds, teamcom crackled to life. "Breaker 2, this is Breaker 2-2 Foxtrot, two Jackals neutralized, one marine wounded." Elsa swore inside her helmet. emTwo Jackals against four marines and they somehow tagged one./em/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"The raider shuddered loudly, slamming her helmeted head against the bulkhead as pipes and hoses swung and flailed across the corridor. "Did something blow?" asked Zhang as squadcom went live "Breaker two," Jurgens voice crackled in her ears, "be advised, the Sangheili have boarded the raider."/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"She sighed in relief. So many things could go wrong in a derelict ship during a boarding action, reactor could go, magazine detonation, the rush of air in a decompressing vessel trapping a marine against a hole in the hull and literally turning him inside out, and most of these things were preceded by a large bang. Allies joining the fight was pretty good, even if they were hingeheads./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Corporal," a marine whispered, "group of vultures, five or six, they're peeking the turn right here," the marine was secured with his back braced against the wall, sliding a camera cable around the corner. "We jump out and they'll tag us." The corporal nodded, a very large very bald man named Hamish, and pulled out a flash-bang grenade. "Standby, marines." He said as he pulled the pin and hurled it down the corridor with the waiting Jackals. Elsa heard it clatter off of one of the walls and then detonate in a brilliant flash./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"She and the rest of Charlie team dashed out, weapons blazing, the five of them lining up the crosshairs on one of the jackals and pulling the triggers. The 7.62 rounds of their MA5s literally tore them apart at these short, short ranges. And the gang of slavers were dead in seconds, deaf and blind, totally able to respond./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Suddenly, a pair of claws grabbed one of the marines from behind, a private whose nametape read "CLARK," from behind, ripping her EVA suit and biting into her shoulder. Clark screamed in pain, trying to force the claws from off of her, as her blood, Jackal blood, and EVA puncture sealant foam began to mingle in the air. She pushed off as hard as possible with her legs, slamming into a bulkhead with all the force she could muster./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"From the sound of the Jackals agonized screech, she had broken something important. Hamish was on her in a second, whipping a knife out of its sheath and sticking the jackal in the neck, the bird's screeching ending in an awkward wet squawk./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Clark pulled out of the Jackals dead clutches, "light on," he warned the team, before turning on his head lamps. Clark was covered in claw marks and had a deep bite on her left shoulder. One of her teammates grabbed a canister of biofoam from Clark's rucksack and applied the white creamy material over the shoulder, restoring the vacuum seal and staunching the bleeding. Corporal Hamish did the same to the claw marks, white foam plugging up the red gaps in the now-bloodstained EVA suit./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;""Diego," Clark ordered a subordinate, "take Clark back to the Pelican and get her stabilized. These Jackals are playing extra dirty today, Woods, Major Litvak, and I will stay here and hold this junction."/p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Elsa would've done the same were she in Clark's position. Now understrength, pushing deeper was a bad idea, but this junction of the ship was probably important. Each of the three took a firing position down one of the three corridors that met at the junction./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"There wasn't much to do at this point but sit quietly and listen. Every few minutes, the crack of small arms fire would ring out, with the odd swooshing sound of Covie plasma weaponry, punctuated by sounds of pain. After the clock said five minutes had passed, the Captain, via Lieutenant Jurgens, sounded the all-clear, the ship had been seized, and gave a waypoint to the cells where the Grunt captives had been held./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Squad 2-2 had secured it, being led there by a Grunt thrall who had seen the humans present and had, against all odds, intuited that they were there to free the rest of them, and led them to the cell. They were a squalid sight, 50 grunts all sharing a space maybe a hundred cubic meters big, shit and broken eggs everywhere, shackled together. One of the Swords of Sanghelios was busy with some kind of plasma torch, unchaining the Grunts, while a marine with an angle grinder did the same from the other end of the chain./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"Litvak had used Grunts as the butt of jokes many times, she'd shot them, stabbed them, run them over, called artillery strikes on their positions, but in an instant, a lifetime of animosity dissolved. She saw a mother, or at least a parent, assuring her starving children that everything was going to be alright now, she could tell from the body language and the size of the three tiny Unggoy that accompanied her, too small for the shackles, as she waited her turn for the marine with the angle grinder. Unggoy in the red harnesses of the Swords of Sanghelios passed out water, methane tanks, and clothing./p
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p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal;"The butcher's bill for the boarding action ended up being four wounded, decent but not optimal out of the platoon of forty, she'd have to talk to Jurgens about reorganizing the squads. But it was worth it. She heard it in the urgency of the marines to help, he saw it in the teary eyes of the Unggoy children, the overwhelming feeling of cooperation that spontaneously arose, across an immense language barrier and after 27 years of war, between her marines and the Sangheili. It was worth it./p