Written by Toggers, AKA: Master Sergeant Magnet
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You never quite get used to weightlessness.
Sure you adjust, you grow accustomed to having no sense of up or down, and you learn to move in your environment. But that sinking feeling in your gut? That's primordial. The sensation of falling never quite goes away.
I couldn't tell you the number of times I've felt it. Ever since I was an infant, moving in zero gravity has been nearly as natural as breathing. But that pit in the gut never really goes away no matter how often I go ZG.
At least I have the reassurance of my mag-boots clinging to the hull, and the added contacts in my knees is worth every credit for the upgrade. Trying to accurately run a plasma torch while squatting in your boots is nightmarishly difficult. I'm rewarded for my efforts with a small jet of crystallized moisture from around my arc.
I stop long enough to seal the wound with the pen shaped charge I have in my pouch and rise back to my feet. I hang the cutter off my belt and key my radio.
"Last one in position." I look up at my companion who had finished placing his own identical devices on the opposite end of the two square meter panel. The small shaped charges weren't very powerful on their own, but with a dozen they would easily pop the panel free of the frame beneath them. You would think they'd have fixed this freighter model's design flaw after nearly a century of service.
With a nod Retne braces himself out of the way, unslinging his rifle in a smooth motion. I grab my own and hold up my arm with three fingers out to count down. Swing. Swing. Swing. Duck & turn.
The blast of atmosphere blowing out as the cabin explosively decompresses is enough to briefly allow me to hear the rush of wind past me as it's displaced into the void. After a moment it's over, and I turn back to observe our handiwork, only to nearly rip myself free of the hull as I'm brought face-to-face with the fresh corpse of a Ship's Officer.
His already frozen hands locked to an exposed beam, having tried and failed to save himself from the absolute zero vacuum. I shake my momentary shock away before reaching out to rip the keycard from the Officer's uniform, the Captain's Mate from the look of it. At least the rest of the boarding should be straightforward enough. We drift past the three other bodies to the open door inside, letting ourselves be caught by the artificial gravity.
The interior glows with the dull red of the emergency lights, and as we reseal the door we entered from the slow hiss of air refills the hallway. Leave it to the megacorp designers to not bother with proper airlocks throughout the vessel, but only around the bridge. I lead us through the familiar halls of the common freighter model right towards the crew quarters. By now the bridge knows there's been a breach, but with luck it'll just look like a hull failure and not an attack.
A quick jab with my off hand towards the left of the door and I take my spot on the right, we don't need words for this part. A brief look and nod between us and we explode into action, in mere moments the door opens and the soldiers who had been preparing their oxygen kits and magsuits are caught unprepared. Four more down.
We don't linger, I follow Retne out this time. Standard crew for a ship this size is ten, that only leaves the helmsman and Captain. Surprise is gone, the interior sensors definitely have alerted them to gunfire. It won't matter, we came prepared.
The bridge doors are hardened against attacks and torches, but we stack up all the same. Time for the final trick up our sleeves. Retne pulls a cylinder from his belt, and with the pull of a pin the grenade fills the hallway with an acrid thick cloud of burning phosphorus smoke.
Klaxons blare as the fire suppression system engages, and the rush of air begins again when the system begins purging the atmosphere to snuff the imaginary fires. The smoke desperately clinging to any nearby wall as surface tension keeps it adhered for a moment. We finally move, just before the last of the smoke clears we open fire on the cameras overlooking the hall.
It's quiet again for the 30 odd seconds it takes to recycle the air into the no longer "burning" hallway. One more nod and the keycard I swiped comes in handy as I hold it by the entry panel, with any luck the Captain thinks his Second in Command has arrived with the soldiers and killed the foolish would-be pirates.
I did not, in fact, possess such luck.
The door did open, yes. But instead of a pair of Officers I expected, I'm instead sent tumbling when a metal fist collides with my chest. I slam the bulkhead behind me hard and slide to the floor. Of course the cartel assholes had a Spectre, I can see the Captain past the death machine with a stupid ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face as he shouts something I'm too concussed to make out.
I try to raise my rifle only for the metal monstrosity to grab the muzzle and toss it as hard as it's capable of sideways. Unfortunately it's still attached to me by the sling, and I join my rifle on it's journey across the hallway, going ass over teakettle on my way.
There's that funny feeling in my gut again. I'll tell you what, it's hard enough to tell the floor from the ceiling on a ship when you aren't being manhandled by two-hundred kilos of angry death on artificial legs. I try to stand up, only to have the unfortunate realization that I'm still upside down with my feet magnetized to the wall. I see that same metal fist coming at me again, and it's all I can do to yank myself sideways, feeling it brush by my head by a matter of millimeters.
If you ask me a thousand times I'd still not have a good answer beyond "Panicked desperation" and "Instinct" for what happened next. But staring face to face with the solid metal armored killing machine, I managed to surprise the both of us when my knife hit it's chassis.
If one could leave a machine flummoxed, I may have accomplished it on this day as we both pause for a moment to look at my combat knife wedged into the gap between the Spectre's arm joint and shoulder. The moment was over near as soon as it started however when it turned back with what I imagine must have been what passed for righteous indignation and wound back for one last strike.
I admit to flinching here, but my little duel with the Ghost in the Machine was interrupted by the retort of a Wingman from point blank, and the hulking thing collapsed like a puppet with their strings cut, the fresh hole in it's head sparking and leaking oil.
I also admit that I had kinda forgotten that Retne was here, a turn of my head seeing a growing pool of blood on the floor of the bridge we had been trying to breach.
"Still hanging in there?" I can feel his smirk through his opaque helmet.
"Needed a change of perspective was all. Now would you help me down, asshole?" He grabs my plate carrier & with an odd motion of his arm I am flipped rightwards and once again for the thousandth time staggered by the difference in strength between me and the average pilot. I take a moment to catch my breath, my armor plate definitely saved me from having my organs crushed earlier, but I knew the wicked bruise I already felt forming would not be fun to explain to Osborne. When I can breathe again without feeling like I was actively dying we make our way onto the bridge, stepping over the Captain and the fonts of blood from his new cranial ventilation.
With practiced ease we go through the computers, taking the hard drives and copying all the data we can salvage before finally making our way towards the cargo bay and reason we came here. The majority of crates stacked neatly from floor to ceiling are full of nothing valuable, mostly consumer goods and foodstuffs, but the secured containers at the rear are where the real money is at.
A dozen fusion batteries, each one capable of powering a titan for days. In our case however they instead could keep our generator going for weeks each, not to mention keeping War-Dog in running shape. We grab them all, as well as at least a half dozen crates of processed meals and rations (never hurts to keep the pantry stocked after all), and move everything into position by the bay doors before we turn back to take one last look throughout the ship before disembarking.
Retne heads to the fore, back towards the crew quarters to see if there's anything valuable, which leaves me to go aft, into engineering. I weave myself through the corridors of pipes, wires, and conduits, keeping my eyes peeled for anything worth taking. I do find a toolbox (and you really can't have enough of those around the base), but as I turn to abandon my search I nearly trip on an unseen pipe. Looking down at it I notice something wedged under the offending pipe, a twisted bundle of tattered rags and wires, covered in a thick layer of dust.
I pull it out of it's hiding spot, and my blood runs cold. I have seen this kind of thing before, a lifetime ago, in a place I normally try to bury deep enough to never see daylight, but it's dragged kicking and screaming into my mind now.
A doll. A child's doll. A string of letters and numbers are scrawled on one of the rags that make up what passes for the things clothes, undoubtedly a serial number. Not a name…
I stare at the doll for what felt like hours before I start moving again, from the caked on dust and detritus, it's safe to say the thing has been here for years. A search around shows no other signs of it's former owner. I gingerly place it into the toolbox I had found and make my way back to the cargo hold. Retne is already there, waiting. It's difficult to tell with his helmet on, but I see it from his body language. The tension, the frustration, the anger. We exchange a look, but I don't bother to ask what it is he found, and he doesn't volunteer anything. We both know there's nothing left to be said.
It doesn't take us long to crack the bay doors open, our well positioned parking job having our Goblin magnetically attached mere meters from the doors. We carefully shuttle the containers toward the open ramp of the Goblin, before stepping to the edge of the bay ourselves. Retne goes first, his jumpkit jetting him out and right into the hold. I hesitate for a moment, turning around, as if I expect to see something there. But the only thing there is the cargo hold, and silence. I face back to the void, toolbox clenched tightly in hand, and step out of the artificial gravity and into the empty embrace of space. That feeling in my stomach doesn't bother me so much right now, there's something else I feel instead.
And I fucking hate that I'm used to it…