Stormblood, стр. 142

‘I’m with the kid,’ Jasken grunted behind his skullface helmet. Vanto and Kuen nodded their agreement.

‘We can’t risk it,’ Katherine told Saren. ‘We find another route.’

The barrier whined and glowed with heat as the cultists began cutting their way through. ‘There’s nowhere else to go,’ Saren yelled.

‘Then we make somewhere.’ Jasken kneeled down and primed a micronade on the floor as the barricade gave a tortured groan, bullets spilling out through the opening slit. The five of us formed another armour wall, spraying covering fire, sheltering Jasken with our bodies. Gunfire clattered on the walls around me, grazing my helmet. Vanto yelled and clutched at his chest as a fusillade almost punched through his shields, his armour blackened and guttering with little fires. The barricade creaked higher. Armoured legs became visible beneath. Pipes along the walls bursting, showering oily fluids in hissing arcs, spraying across my faceplate.

‘You might want to step back!’ Jasken yelled. The words were barely out of his mouth before the micronade detonated, carving open a man-sized hole in the metal. One by one, we dropped into the corridor below.

I glanced up, breathing hard in my helmet. Kuen was the last to come, about to jump down when a barrage of gunfire blasted him backwards and killed his shielding. Saren tried to go back for him, but a cultist swept up behind him and planted his slingshiv through Kuen’s chest. Metal slithered out through his back, glistening wetly. He screamed, hands feebly trying to fend off the armoured cultist in front of him, when a second slingshiv went skewering through his faceplate and his body went limp.

Spitting threats of retribution, Jasken lobbed a microgrenade back up through the hole and yelled at us to run like hell, a shockwave travelling up my back as we tore down the halls, rage fuelling the burning in my legs. The edges of my vision merged with the Renchio battlefields. Foreign languages screaming for the murder of my friends. Dirt and mud crunching beneath my feet.

But I was here now, with a new fireteam willing to lay down their lives for mine, willing to walk into hell with me. Like the old one did. Fighting for a future where their sacrifice and courage counted. Ratchet. Alacatrz. Cable. Kyra. Drummer. Everything I was, everything that had been done to me, I put into this moment. I let the battle-memory burn in me with a fire that not even stormtech could muster.

We raced into a gently lit hangar bay, easily three-hundred metres tall and twice as wide. A semi-completed arrivals hall for a spaceport hotel lobby near the pinnacle of the asteroid. Scaffoldings ran along the perimeter, the walls still charred ash-black from Harvest artillery. A window bay had been torn open, only the translucent blue shield-barrier holding back the hard vacuum of space.

We kept our weapons up and readied as we swept through. ‘No grenades or trap mechanisms in the room,’ Grim told us.

‘No one on thermal,’ Katherine called out.

‘All clear,’ Saren said.

But my hackles were raised and I didn’t hesitate saying so. An exit large enough to drive a chainship through sat open at the top of the metal walkway. We got halfway there before an armoured blast door guillotined down. Magnetic securing bolts the size of a man punched home, echoing like gunshots through the hangar.

‘That’s a dreadnought-class blast door,’ Vanto growled. ‘It’d take a warship to punch through that!’

‘Watch out!’ Grim yelled. Around us, a series of black-barrelled, black-muzzled nanogun turrets thrust out of hidden crevices. Their targeting software was already locked onto us. We ducked down behind a ledge as the soundscape was obliterated, the barrage of rounds shattering the world around us, metal splinters showering out like spears.

‘They’ve got MR-19s!’ Jasken roared, our armour scraping as we inched closer together, blaster fire gouging furrows in the sintered regolith all around us.

‘Meaning what?’ Saren roared back.

‘Meaning we’re screwed!’

Because the universe has got such a messed-up sense of humour, the shield-barrier at the far end of the hangar began crackling. Dread gnawed through my guts.

‘Grav-boots, now!’ I yelled. ‘They’re going to breach us!’

The words were barely out of my mouth before the shield-barrier disappeared and the world was sucked out into space.