Salvage Marines (Necrospace Book 1) (14 page)

His loyalty was not to Grotto and the Corporation’s loyalty was not to him, it had always been about the money, for both sides. Only now was he seeing clearly that his relationship with Grotto was one-sided, even when it didn’t have to be. He felt powerful in that moment, and it galvanized him to win this fight for himself, and Grotto could gnaw at the scraps.

The mech-warrior turned and spit rounds at his position after Samuel took a second potshot at the hostile war machine. Samuel held his hands on the ladder and his feet out to the sides so that he could control his rapid descent to the floor. His decision to move had been just in time, as the enemy’s bullets tore a multitude of holes in the turbine and shredded much of the inner column. The mech-warrior’s combat rifle might have seemed like a less than impressive weapon to have mounted on a war machine, but Samuel had to respect it more as he realized the rounds were armor piercing.

An explosion rocked the station as the plasma-lance burned through the heating coil of the turbine at Unit 17 and caused a series of secondary explosions. The marines were attacking the mech-warrior on all sides, and the Helion pilot was moving his machine in a continuous, even graceful, series of pirouettes as its mounted guns attempted to track the multitude of targets.

After a few moments of furious firefighting the mini-gun finally went dry and the plasma-lance sputtered through its final blast. In a matter of perhaps sixty seconds the marines had surrounded the mech-warrior.

Spencer emerged from the shadows with a “sticky” bomb and hurled it at the war machine. The bomb was a standard fragmentary grenade, as salvage marines were allowed no other type of explosive for fear that they would cause an unprofitable amount of collateral damage if allowed to have more incendiary devices. Spencer and a few of the other marines had started carrying sticks of a wax-like adhesive they used to coat their grenades to make them stick to whatever they were thrown against. The tactics did not work one hundred percent of the time and were not standard kit, but it worked enough that they kept doing it.

The pilot must have realized that he was about to be overrun and the mech-warrior’s servo-legs groaned as he pushed the war machine into a sprint towards the exit.

Samuel had been approaching him from that side and realized as the mech-warrior turn towards him that Virginia was between them. Samuel raised his rifle and began pounding the mech’s thick cockpit armor with concentrated fire as he got the pilot’s attention. The war machine rushed past Virginia, who managed to fire a parting shot before hurling herself over the railing and into the shallow sump tank under the turbine.

Samuel turned to find cover as the mech-warrior opened up with its mounted combat rifle. His senses flared in pain as an armor piercing round drilled through his armor and struck him somewhere in the back. He instantly lost feeling from his chest down and collapsed in a heap. The force of the strike had spun him around and Samuel had landed on his back. He tried to raise his hand to reach for his gun, but found that he could not make it move. Before he could give too much thought to his unresponsive limbs, Spencer’s sticky bomb exploded.

The frag grenade by itself would have not been enough to crack the mech’s armor, but it had gotten stuck between a shoulder joint and what looked like the mech’s empty ammunition canisters so the force of the blast did the real work. The mech’s right arm was blown off, in addition to the ammunition canister, and the entire war-machine went crashing to the ground.

Samuel couldn’t move his head, but from his vantage point he could see that the mech’s pilot had been turned into something unrecognizable by the concussion of the blast inside the cockpit.

Samuel felt the darkness of unconsciousness start to slide over him, and he would have moved to inject himself with another stim hypo if he could only have moved his hands.

His mind wandered, moving from one moment in his life to the other, as if he was watching critical times in his life on playback, and he knew his life was coming to an end. In medic training they’d taught him about how the mind cycled through faded memories at the moment before expiration, as if searching for any last scrap of knowledge to aide in surviving.

Samuel found himself imagining his wife, standing before a beautiful house in a dark forest, the daydream they’d shared so many times since he became a Reaper. It was a pleasant fantasy, he thought as he felt himself finally slipping beneath the waves.

The gloom swallowed him and Samuel Hyst lay still as blood pooled underneath him.

A Note from the Author

Thank you for taking this grim adventure alongside the Reapers of Grotto Corporation. Though this was a hard end to a hard tale, this story is far from over. Forces align against one another in the depths of space and behind the closed doors of corporate boardrooms.

Stay alert for the next installment of the Necrospace series, where the journey will continue for some, and end for others.

This is the job.