From Darkness

[Manticore]

LAMBERT

James Lambert grappled with paralyzing indecision as he guided his Guardian in a complex evasive pattern. It was the gnawing hesitancy that kept him from doing the logical thing and following the retreating fleet to safety.

He pulled the flight stick around in another practiced evasion maneuver as his time continued to tick away. He hung on between two imperfect choices, paralyzed by inaction, and remained as the sole Libertonian ship that had not begun the slow, agonizing retreat from the Rheinlander onslaught. No, James Lambert still held his ground as enemy fighters and capital gunners continued to lock on to his tiny craft.

He knew he should join his compatriots and run for the safety of home. Unlike at so many other points in his tortured past, he didn’t particularly want to die today.

And yet… the thought of fleeing and abandoning the marines he’d come to call brothers in arms was anathema to him. If there was something he could do to help, some way he could make a difference, he would gladly do it – at whatever cost. Those men deserved better than being abandoned, shot in the back, and dumped out an airlock.

But he had things to live for now, a career back in Liberty, not to mention Pita. What would become of the little ex-Rogue if he never came home? Who would take care of her?

He wrenched his Guardian to the right, grunting in frustration. The last Libertonian ship vanished into the tradelane, and he was alone – forgotten here along with his marines.

Just then, a pair of green bolts from a cruiser hit home, and his ship shuddered as the boiling energy dissipated his shields and ripped viciously into the armor. In that split second of panic, Lambert made a decision.

He brought the nose around, goosing the thrusters as his ship blasted off on a direct course for Altona. With his left hand he brought up a scan of the station, looking for a suitable place…

“Kappa Thirteen, report! Kappa Thirteen!” It was Peterson.

With cold conviction, Lambert reached down and disabled his group communications and IFF transponder. It was much too late to turn back now, and he couldn’t afford to argue the point with the wing commander.

There! A docking bay along the high port side of the station, ripped open to space by marine explosives. The wound in the station’s side looked plenty large enough to support his Guardian, so Lambert brought the entrance up as a subtarget and weaved his way towards it.

Another hit blasted away his recovering shields, and he suddenly realized he would only have one chance to get his ship through the narrow gash. For some reason, that didn’t bother him as much as it should’ve.

He crossed the last few hundred meters in a flash, focused completely on the shape of the station growing rapidly larger out the front glass. He spotted his target landing zone visually, and adjusted his approach angle just slightly. Then, as he closed within a hundred meters, he killed his engines and entered a drifting slide.

He jerked the fighter around just as the hull of Altona flashed past, bringing the ship’s nose to face the station’s side even as he continued to drift past. He waited a brief second, and then… there it was! A docking bay along the high port side of the station, its outer hull ripped apart by explosives, yawned open before him. A maw of steel teeth with a dark throat.

Lambert instinctively aimed for the center of the breach as it drifted past, and fired his thrusters in three short blasts. Immediately the fighter changed direction, accelerating for the gap in the station’s armor. His arm flew down to kill the drift and re-engage his engines as the Guardian narrowly cleared the jagged steel of the gash and entered the small docking bay behind it.

The fighter’s main engines roared to life, and Lambert slammed the reverse as the back wall of the bay leapt towards him out of the darkness. He killed the forward velocity just in time – with mere feet to spare, and with a twitch of the overhead positioning jets he was down on the deck. Engaging the magnetic landing gear, he anchored the Guardian to the floor as he finally let out a long breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding.

Taking a moment to glance around the bay, Lambert realized that he shared it with only one other vessel – one of the Kodiak assault transports the marines had used to insert themselves onto the station. The hulking black shape of the marine craft sat silently several dozen feet away, showing no signs of life. Lambert knew that marine assault pilots were trained to stay with their ships – except for the fact that they doubled as medics and could be called in to the front so they could extract wounded men.

To be certain this was the case, Lambert pinged the inert ship with a standard Liberty Navy hail on a tight beam, but there was no response. Sighing in resignation, he popped the Guardian’s hatch, and reached behind his head to where he kept a standard issue sidearm for emergencies.

He thanked his lucky stars that he’d had the foresight to wear the combat armor as he vaulted from the cockpit, floating in the zero-gee of the unpressurized bay. He secured the sidearm at his waist, and then tied his armor’s communications back into the marine battle net. There was still some scattered chatter, but the channel was far quieter than the last time he’d tuned in. That was not a good sign.

A gentle tap of the small thruster pack embedded in his suit sent him forward and down, towards the secured hatch at the rear of the gutted bay. He grabbed the opening mechanism as he floated up to it, and wrenched the hatch open, assisted by the armor’s servomotors. Air blasted out as the small area beyond rapidly depressurized, but then Lambert was able to float through and secure the hatch behind him. The small corridor served as an impromptu airlock, for it contained nothing aside from an identical hatch roughly twenty feet ahead. Lambert opened this, drawing his sidearm as he did, but it was silent on the other side.

His heavy suit of armor gently thumped to the deck as the station’s artificial gravity generators finally captured his mass. There was air in this portion of the station, now, but it remained eerie in its silence. Lambert briefly recalled the marine chatter about the same silence as they had first boarded the station. The only difference was that they had entered unsuspecting, while Lambert was fully aware that he was walking into a deadly trap.

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