FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Hi everyone.

Not sure how I feel about this chapter. It came out kind of forced, to my mind. Anyway, give me your opinions on it, if you'd be so kind? Thanks for reading!

Chapter 24

A Marine brought his bullpup rifle around, ignoring the shouting cacophony of panicked troops as he tried to orient on the beast in their midst. It was full seven feet tall, covered in green and yellow spiny chitin plates, its mad faceted eyes swirling with reflection of the orange emergency lights and muzzle flares of panicking troops. A flick of her great talons, and one of his squad-mates seemed to fly apart from the gut, spilling shredded intestine as he went down gurgling, even as the horrid creature's momentum continued, bulling through half a dozen other Marines and slicing into them with shrieks that buffeted his inner ear and sent the Marine with the bullpup rifle staggering to the side, his shot ruined.

In the chaos of shouting and gunfire, disoriented Marines were sliced apart in sprays of gore, crushed broken to the floor, hit by friendly fire, the air full of the acrid stink of cordite and coppery stench of spilling blood. The Marine with the bullpup rifle managed to line up a shot, snapping off two bursts of glittering plasma pulses that sizzled off the bug's chitinous armor.

Then the queen whirled towards him. He froze, staring into her huge, black, facet-covered eyes. Her shriek hit his inner ear like a sledge hammer, and he howled out, squeezing the trigger again and spraying fully automatic fire against her unyielding hide. She grabbed someone, slamming her taloned arm through his chest and out his back, then slung the body like a missile, twisting like a rag doll through the air.

The Marine with the bullpup rifle was smashed flat, his weapon bouncing away from nerveless fingers as the blackness in the maddened bug queen's eyes loomed up and filled his vision, while he faded away into darkness.

As Stalker pranced along, cavorting in the underground like a child with a new toy, his tigress shadowed along behind, escorting the grav-lift gurney that bore their quarry. Somehow, she felt as if they were parading him, like a prize buck on a pole, even though they were surrounded by stone and rats and not a soul to see their dubiously glorious conquest.

On the gurney, strapped down with heavy chain, duct tape, and enough zip ties that it looked somehow mummy-like, lay the ragged remains of a massive male lion. She couldn't bring herself to look again, not after the few seconds she'd stared in shock while he was being carried out of the cul-de-sac cave they'd cornered him in. He looked more like a pile of raw hamburger and fur than anything living.

When Stalker had cheerfully pronounced their mission successful, she'd just stared at him, too shocked to respond. Their orders, handed down from the strange and ever-enigmatic Shadow Two, were to capture the lion, not to grenade him to death in a shitty underground storage room.

It gave her a spark of hope, in some strange sense, that maybe Two would find a way to get rid of Ten. Then again, she mused, Ten was far more physically dangerous than Two if looks were anything to go by. She might be in the midst of a power play between two of the galaxy's most dangerous furs.

Then again, she knew, the other ten Shadows were likely already involved. The whole situation felt like a noose, slowly tightening down on her neck, and she was trapped inexorably in the Stalker's wake. The tigress didn't let herself glare at his back. If he knew how much she hated him, for his heartless murdering and gleeful sadism, she might just become his next target.

When she saw the corpse twitch, the tigress didn't even register brushing it off, at first. She'd seen enough dead bodies to know that sometimes they moved, either from gasses shifting in the body or nerve twitches. So seeing a mangled foot shiver slightly merely made the tigress a bit queasy.

She was far more concerned by the fact that Stalker's shoulders had hunched forward slowly as they walked, a sign of tension from the psychopath, as if he were a spring being cinched down before flying loose. When he stopped dead and looked back over his shoulder at her studiously blank face beneath her utterly blank mask, his expression chilled her far more than any body twitch every could.

"Cassy, my dear, please check the radios. I think something is wrong with our exfiltration route."

Cassy blinked at him, having never heard the Stalker use her first name before. Somehow, she didn't precisely feel honored. More like terrified that he even noticed her as an entity. However, she couldn't let that cold spike of ice in her chest slow down her obedience, or she'd be in even worse shape than the mountainous corpse she escorted.

A paw shot to her rounded ear, touching the fabric that lay over it to activate the radio system. For a moment, there was resounding silence. Then, there was a horrible shrieking noise, as if ten thousand chalkboards were being attacked by every fingernail that had ever existed.

With a grunt and a wince, she slapped at her ear, shutting the speaker down.

"Sir, we're being jammed. The resistance fighters down here are resourceful, but I doubt they have the technology for this."

"Yes yes, Two's wonderful little upgraded toys are broken," he responded, rolling his eyes in derision. "That's fine. We'll change course."

"Sir, we don't have any maps of the surrounding area."

"Then we had best kill someone and take theirs. Use the heart beat detector Two souped up for you, and find the largest cluster of nearby living people."

The corpse twitched again, a single finger this time. Cassy just swallowed her bile, and hastened to pull out the boxy screen Stalker referred to. Twitchy corpses weren't her problem, she resolved to herself.

Derry pulled up short of the sinkhole's lip, making a quick paw-signal for the others to stay back. He quickly explained, while very slowly shifting himself forward to peer down over the edge, looking down on the frantic bustling that went on just twenty feet below.

"Major enemy camp...I count at least two hundred, at a glance. If we headed straight left from here, we would hit a major habitation block. Waters, check the seismo for signs of combat."

The vixen-ape squatted and reached down to her belt, soundlessly sliding a flat black disc off of it and palming the thing to slowly drift it with her paw over the ground. Inside her headset, readouts slid by quickly.

"Multiple explosions straight to our left...Looks like the hab-block is a combat zone. Other seismic readings all over the place, though...Looks like intermittent combat going on pretty much everywhere, even above and below."

Derry nodded, very slowly, as he pulled back from the edge with glacial speed to take advantage of his suit's remaining camouflage. The right leg of his suit, just below where he'd been shot a few hours before, had malfunctioned and reverted to matte-grey octagon-covered material, and he wasn't about to risk the rest of his active camo going offline at a bad moment.

"I always wondered why his hidey-hole was out here. He planned for this, and left distractions behind on his escape route. Okay, we go around the sinkhole and keep heading forward. Our destination is about a half click to our right once we reach the intersection, but we'll have to be careful. Steam pipes, some of them still functional. They can boil the skin right off you."

With any luck, assuming Olliver hadn't bulled through a wall to make a path instead of following the routes that already existed, he would meet them at that intersection. Or so Derry hoped. The undercity changed quite often, without building code enforcement to prevent people from knocking down walls or building new routes.

So they moved, with nerve-bending slowness, backs pressed to the wall on one side of the massive sinkhole, listening all the while to distant firefights that echoed up from the tunnels around the subterranean camp, hearing the nervous words and movements of their foes in unassailable numbers so closely nearby.

Staff Sergeant Herrin of the 17th Marine Infantry, graying leonine fur crisply cut short, silently swam his way out of the on-ship barber's shop. Blinded by the lack of light, floating from the lack of gravity or mag-boots, and bleeding from the barber's scissors when they had accidentally plunged into his scalp during the EMP, he nonetheless never went anywhere without his sidearm and the readiness to use it.

So, when Junta Marines had poured through the Fist's recreation deck, he had laid low until they were nearly past his position, then moved quick and quiet to get behind them, silently ordering the Navy barber's mate to stay put in the shop's back room with quick-flashed paw signals.

His enemy, un-hindered by the lack of light, moved quickly through the commissary area, flashes of light and sound indicating they had engaged and downed some of Herrin's fellows. As gravity began to re-exert itself after the brief outage, orange emergency lights began to flicker to life, and the aging lion laid himself flat next to a bullet-riddled Navy crewman, playing possum and counting enemy troops with slit-open eyes as they filed past his spot.

The grizzled veteran felt the rage, burning under his skin, urging him to get up and avenge his comrades. Long experience, though, told him to keep his cool, to keep his head, or else his revenge would be for nothing.

When the count of enemy troops reached three hundred and showed no sign of slowing, Herrin knew he was right next to the enemy boarding crews' main point of entry. Tactically speaking, it made sense - the Fist's main recreation deck had several relatively large open areas for use as gymnasiums, which would easily double as marshalling zones for incoming troops. Likewise, the large spaces meant a smaller number of armored bulkheads that could be sealed against attackers.

How they had burrowed so deep into the ship was somewhat more a mystery. The Rec Deck was near the Fist's vertical center, and though some sections were near the outer hull, for the most part they were behind significant armoring and auxiliary storage compartments for stable non-perishable goods.

The only answer was that their entry craft must have been equipped with some sort of new technology. A fast drill, maybe, or even a modified plasma cutter for melting through battleship-grade armor plating. One way or the other, he needed to get clear and warn his commanders of where the enemy were marshalling.

If the enemy were adhering to anything like standard naval boarding tactics, they would have breached in a half dozen places or more at once. The other entries would be diversions, groups meant to sow confusion in the defenders, and possibly disable auxiliary defensive systems. This main group would be tasked with splitting into three forces; one to secure their foothold, one to head for engineering and try to cripple the Fist's engines and generators, and a third to head straight for the Bridge.

SSgt Herrin lay still as long as he could stand, until a brief break in the stream of incoming enemies allowed him to crawl a few inches, unseen, toward a store front that might contain a wired phone. Another unit moved past, and he waited, crawling inches more between groups.

His brain swirled with curse-words. He almost wished they'd notice him, just so he could quit the frustrating game of stealth when so close to the enemy.

Galen managed to lever the Bridge doors open with an emergency crowbar, much to his consternation. If the safeties had reacted correctly, they should have been sealed in there by blast doors that would have fallen from the ceiling and secured themselves mechanically to the floor. The effects of being so near a singularity might have warped the tracks, or damaged the sensors meant to detect a loss of electrical power.

The two Marines whose duty was to guard that door lay sprawled in the hall beyond. One was clearly unconscious, bleeding from his scalp, and the other was grunting, trying to straighten out a shattered leg with paws shaking in shock. Galen strode to him, grabbed the Marine by the drag handles over his shoulders, and pulled him back into the bridge, despite the canine's yelp of agony.

"Stay with me, Marine!" he shouted, and the authority in his voice seemed to lend the wounded dog some iron, straightening his spine. To his credit, the aussie shepherd still had his rifle, clutched convulsively in one paw. His eyes were wide, shocky from pain and surprise.

"Which pocket has your chem lights?"

The Marine gestured with a drunken paw motion, wobbling to one side before Galen's powerful arms pushed his shoulders back against the blast wall. It took the wolf moments to find the necessary pocket, from which he pulled a half dozen little plastic sticks, cracked them, and tossed the glowing things down onto the Bridge's floor. With two left, he cracked one for the dog, tossing it into the hall to give him some line of sight, and slid the last into his own breast pocket.

Quick motions had the Commander's heavy service pistol with its silver grips in paw, racked and ready, before he patted the gasping Marine's shoulder and forced him to meet eyes. Something about that stare got the Marine more cognizant, helped him fight down the shock.

"Marine, we've been boarded. I'm going to go coordinate with our security teams. You're going to guard this bridge with your life, understand?"

The dog bobbed his head, more sharply than before, his head still swimming with pain and flashing lights.

"Y-yes sir...You got it boss..."

Galen moved away again, grabbed the second Marine, and dragged his heavy frame back into the entry landing, laying the unconscious timber wolf off to one side before taking his carbine and recharge batteries, holstering his pistol in favor of the more deadly weapon. Then he crouched and hustled into the hall, clearing both directions with his appropriated rifle, lupine night sight picking out detail despite the piss-poor lighting.

Without a Corpsman or ship's surgeon on the bridge, there was nothing more he could do for the wounded command staff or Marines. He didn't even have an escort, and with potential enemies anywhere on the Fist, Galen knew what he was about to attempt would be risky.

Thirty paces, measured by his analytical mind and memorized in his short time aboard the battleship, took him past the edge of where the light was strong enough to see by and to the ship's main elevator shaft. Placing his tall, pointed ear against the metal let him hear the sound of clattering climbing equipment, and shouts that meant friendly troops were incoming. Enemies wouldn't be shouting, as their comm. units would have been outside of the EMP's destruction radius.

Using the crowbar again, he threw his powerful, muscular frame into opening the sheer steel doors. Within moments, the warped metal shrieked once and slid open on one side, allowing previously-muffled voices to come through loud and clear.

"Master Chief, any idea where the enemy are?"

"Not a fucking clue. Keep climbing."

Galen stuck his arm out, and waved, to the sound of clattering climbing gear as the security team pointed rifles his way and braced their feet against the shaft walls. Especially given the unstable gravity since their near miss with a fast-moving black hole, they had been smart enough to use their climbing gear.

"Master Chief," the wolf called out, "Get up here! Do you have a medic with you?"

The security teams sounded relieved, as the ship's head of security called back.

"Commander! Goddamnit, I'm glad you're alive. I've got twenty sailors here and two medics, but I've lost contact with all my other teams. What the hell happened?"

"EMP, Master Chief. Near miss from a Torpedo Run knocked out everything. Get up here, we've got injured!"

Thirty seconds later, angry, battle-ready sailors began clambering up over the gaping edge of the elevator shaft. Master Chief Corrin, a tall pangolin, came up third, and grabbed Galen's offered paw, shaking it firmly as the officer pulled him off to one side, allowing the enlisted and medics to troop towards the bridge.

"Master Chief, I need ten of your security people to fortify the bridge and hallway. I'm taking the rest down toward the hydraulics controls."

Corrin raised both furless brows, as orange lights began flickering on along the hall's floor.

"Hydraulics? I didn't even know we HAD hydraulic-controlled systems anymore..."

"Yeah, in case we get EMP'd." The big wolf grinned, and gestured around expansively.

"Well shit. I'll guard the bridge, you get the mechanicals back online. Just watch yer ass, Commander. We've already shot up some of the enemy's forward elements. Probably at least half a dozen breaches, but without our computers or comm. systems, there's no good way to tell."

"Work with Lieutenant Cross to fix that, Chief. There's a non-electrical communications system built as a redundancy. She'll need help getting it online. Once its up, give me a call with enemy locations. I'll stay at hydraulics control until you call."

"You got it, Commander."

Trisha hadn't meant to drift off. Staying awake, given the circumstances, had seemed so much a given that she hadn't realized how long she'd been going for. That, on top of being stuffed immobile under an over-warm pile of rags for hours, meant she startled awake from a doze when someone hopped up onto her rubble pile, his boot placing a fully-loaded soldier's weight into her slight side.

Clamping her jaw shut, she barely bit off a scream, as the big cougar looked around, sniffing, crouched low, and gave a stage whisper that made her paradoxically want to punch him for standing on her unwittingly, making noise like a fool. Tension sat in the air like smog, and she could get glimpses of other soldiers having taken up similarly covered positions, all facing the door to the ruined auto shop.

"Sergeant, how many d'you think it is?"

It sounded urgent, that whisper, scared but ready, and she heard him checking his ammunition supply. Though she could barely see, eyes only slitted open in the hopes reflecting light wouldn't give her away, she could nonetheless tell he had some kind of heavy weapon by the slithering-clattering sound of an ammunition belt. Trisha struggled to breathe, with all that weight on top of her, thankfully spread out somewhat by the rubble pile.

Another voice responded.

"Twenty, maybe more...Heartbeat sensors are all fucked up by the walls."

The tension ratcheted up, as Trisha struggled to breathe, all the weight pressing down on her joining together with the dawning sense that everything was about to go wrong. Twenty or more tunnel-dwellers meant a fight one way or the other, and her rubble heap wasn't nearly so solid as the fur on top of her thought. Bullets would go through it, and presumably her slender un-protected body as well.

Shifting as slowly as she could, the young wolf slid her fingers into the sleeve of her shirt, tugging free a tiny knife from the hand-sewn pocket just beneath the hem. When she unfolded it blindly, the 'snick' of the blade lock sounded like a thunder crack in her head, drawing sweat from her skin with a terrified mental image of the soldier looking down and finally spotting her.

He didn't move, except to shift from a stand to a kneel, while flipping down his bipod with a soft click, lashing his thick whip of a tail in nervous anticipation. She struggled, meanwhile, just to keep pulling in slow breaths against the weight that had her whole torso feeling as if it were in a vice.

Then someone yelled, and the thunder of rifle-fire filled the air, forcing her wound-tight body to jerk involuntarily as some instinct screamed at her to take fetal position. Burning heat slapped right into her face, sizzling against her cheek as hot metal shell-casings drizzled down from the LMG that chattered deafeningly just above her head. Screaming as one impacted her slit-open eye, the wolf girl couldn't stop herself from throwing weight to one side, destabilizing the rubble heap and sliding her free of the fur standing on her chest.

"AMBUSH! AGH!"

As she rolled and he spun to bring his LMG to bear on her while sliding down the crumbling rubble heap, Trisha lashed out, slamming her pocket knife hard into the flesh of his knee just beneath the cap, twisting as Tenh had taught her. He screamed and something popped as sticky heat ran over her paw. Then she threw herself flat, landing on top of the shrieking cougar to scrabble forward right off the struggling soldier again, her mind flowing down a river of panic and blood.

Desperate instinct told her to get free of the fight, wide eyes giving her flash images of scruffy, filth and blood-covered locals streaming through a hole in the front wall, firing their antique automatic weapons, bullets whizzing over her head and impacting around her, as soldiers fired back in chattering streams of mixed bullet and plasma pulse fire.

Blood sprayed, limbs flying off bodies as they were pulped by high-velocity ammunition at point blank range. Flesh sizzled as holes were blasted through flesh with white-hot stars of plasma. As she scrambled, someone fell on her hard, slamming the skinny wolf down onto a pile of old tools, scraping and bleeding her as she screeched in horror, shoving at the steaming headless corpse.

From behind, a deafening thud blew out the back wall, and then bullets and death were flying in every direction, cutting through soldiers, resistance fighters, walls, ceilings, and the floor. The corpse that covered her jolted twice, and she screamed, unheard in the cacophonic pandemonium, clawing at the rubble in a mad attempt to get free.

The corpse slid off her back, and she almost stood, almost walked right into the wall of hurtling death. Instead, Tenh's training kept her down, slithering along the rubble pile until the heap shifted and she slid again, landing in a sprawl at the bottom of a man-made crater of car parts and floor concrete, fetching up against the armored side of a wide-eyed, furious, terrified bear.

He roared, and her blood froze solid in an instant of paralyzed terror, staring up into his bright, bloody eyes. Before she could get up or roll aside, he brought his rifle butt down, slamming into the soft of her belly so hard she felt something break and gurgled in agony, arching and trying to gasp and vomit all at once as her paws grabbed vainly at his chest.

His second blow threw her world on a slamming journey of dizzying spins, rolling her across the rubble heap in the wake of a butt-stroke that split her scalp in a blazing arc of agony above her ear. On instinct, she rolled with the hit, and managed to struggle to a paw and a knee, before everything juddered to a stop.

She looked down, at the combat knife he'd thrown, and her own paws grasping its handle on both sides, pressed around the blade where it protruded from her chest. The hateful, terrified glare she saw in his big dark eyes as he grabbed it and wrenched the blade free of her suddenly-gushing flesh and unresisting paws, was a horrible last sight, she thought.

Derry's ocular outlined a strange shape, and he slapped the side of his head hoping to clear the error only to find himself blinking in confusion as the sonar-vision in his face plate began showing him the same thing. Quick paw-motions told his squad to get down, and they did so with the smooth immediacy of the professionals they were.

Then the ocular registered a second shape, outlining the terrible metal titan in a way that made his heart race with recognition. Even knowing it was friendly, the Walker made his paws sweat and his muzzle dry, with the memory of having faced down another blockier one under the same pilot not so long ago.

The naked woman hanging from its hand was what had confused him. He shook his head, figuring he could get the story later, and opened up a communication channel.

"Four, this is Lead. We have eyes on you. You're twenty meters from our position."

In front of him and down the tunnel, his squad-mate's mechanical monster slowed from its trotting pace to a walk, as the normally-acerbic voice of its otter pilot responded in professional, clipped tones.

"Understood, Lead. Is everyone with you?"

Derry knew who he meant, and grinned, looking back at the armadillo Corpsman, who gave him a thumbs-up. He couldn't see the grin, but Derry knew it was there, relieved and pleased to see his mate alive and in one piece.

"Affirmative, Four. Dropping optical camo now. Who's your guest?"

The 'guest' jerked, startled and terrified, her legs held together and arms over her naked breasts, when the Dragonslayers materialized as if from nowhere. Derry could hear a chuffing laugh from Lt. Waters over the comm.

"Jesus, Four. We're not Viking raiders out looking for pussy, y'know."

Olliver's snort communicated derision, even disgust, as he carefully set the feline down just in front of his squad, releasing his steely grip on her torso. The calico immediately slumped, legs giving out in exhaustion born of fear and sleeplessness. Derry moved to her immediately, noting she wasn't entirely nude as he put a paw to her twitching, stiff shoulder. Her eyes looked like dinner plates, as Olliver explained.

"She's a POW now. I captured her as a guide through enemy positions. Lead, there's a whole bloody Army corps down here already, and we're behind their lines as it is."

Derry winced and nodded, as Derkin moved past him, taking the woman in paw to get her wrapped up in an emergency blanket against the clammy chill suffusing the undercity. The wolf looked up at his otter compatriot, as the machine-riding warrior settled down onto his massive haunches, clearing debris with a sweep of his gigantic metal paw to begin drawing in the concrete dust.

"Best I can tell, we are immediately above about six thousand troops engaging in a pitched battle against the locals. Evidently the combat up on street-level is ongoing. It's a messy counteroffensive that isn't going well for either side, but worse for the resistance."

Another few scratches in the soil, and Derry found himself staring more at the strangely graceful yet enormous hand more so than the diagram.

"The locals are coordinated, if poorly trained and armed with obsolete weaponry. There are four major firefights in our vicinity. Two are rolling battles in the hab-zone directly below us, one is a running fight in the old number four subway tube, and the last is some sort of seek-and-destroy action in an abandoned zone."

Derry's heart went cold, as his mind finally finished its struggle to match Olliver's crude map with his own personal knowledge of the underground. He winced, the bullet wound in his rear sending a shock of pain through his body as he straightened up, forcing him to bite his lip before spitting out a series of terse commands.

"Everyone, we have our target area. It's a hot zone. Firefight between the locals and enemy numbers. Our targets are in that area, and we have to extract them immediately. Be ready for this shit to get ugly fast."

Double-checking his rifle as he spoke, Derry didn't look up as he gave a final order.

"Olliver, find a way to secure that POW. We can't take her with us, or she'll blow our stealth."

The calico girl curled up, covering her head with both paws, certain she was about to die.

One moment, the engine room was a sea of total blackness. So far from the exterior of the Fist, the vessel's sheer mass had helped shield the chamber from the damaging effects of the EMP. Massive backlash through the electrical systems had, however, nearly done the job. Engineering Chief Will Karnen slowly pulled his slender equine form through one of the massive engine housings, torpid machinery wrapped around him in a steely embrace only he knew how to properly traverse.

The call came through, as he pushed an antiquated copper wire system into the receiver, spaced like many others down the inside of this engine housing by his own design. The other engineers thought he was nuts, putting ancient switch-board style tech on the inside of an engine, but Karnen had known it might come to this at some point. Lt. Cross's clear, crisp and un-quaking voice came through at last.

"Chief Karnen, can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear, puddin'. Sorry about going quiet. Had to move stations."

"Understood, Chief. What is the status on the engines?"

"Oh they're fucked up pretty good, but I can get them back online in...Oh..."

He looked around, in the utterly lightless black. One of his paws searched out, finding a bit of metal he knew just where to grab, and pushing it up into a housing. With a gentle, thrumming purr, the engines began to slowly spool back up. The horse would have laughed out loud in pride, if doing so wouldn't risk blowing out the poor Lieutenant's ears.

"Right about now, I think."

Communications officers were often chosen for being unflappable. Anyone who couldn't communicate clearly while excited or afraid couldn't serve as a capable comms officer. Nonetheless, a bit of surprised pause was to be expected. Karnen preened at her reaction, grinning to himself as he continued pulling himself through the engine, to get ahead of the soon-to-be-whirling systems.

"Mr. Karnen, I take that to mean the generators are online?"

"Hah! Darlin', I wouldn't be messin' around inside an engine with no power! That's just silly."

He heard the stifled snickering giggle, and grinned his big horsey grin again. Then someone down below yelled, muffled by the housings and machinery between them.

"Chief! Chief, they're coming!"

"Shit. Cross, darlin', tell the Captain we'll have the Fist up and runnin', but we're about to get hit by boarding parties. We're gonna need reinforcements right quick, or else the Fist's engines will be hostages."

"Understood, Chief. Captain Leith sends her regards, and says she'll get troops to you just as fast as she can."

"Yeah good. You tell her she owes me one."

"Heh...She says she owes you more than that, Chief."

A second call was trying to come through the copper lines, and Karnen switched his phone jack to the receiver beneath a blinking red light. His head reactor's mate spoke through in tones he could only classify as highly concerned.

"Chief, um...You know the four Ix'kat drones we use inside the reactor? For moving the waste and stuff?"

"Yeah? Get to the point, Chippy, I'm balls-deep in engine here."

"Sir, they just sorta...Um...Left."

The horse blinked, ears flicking, as his greased-up filthy body slid out of the engine, flopping gracelessly onto the deck plating with a dull thud.

"Ow. What the hell?"

"Yeah, they walked right into decontamination, used the scrubbers, and just...Left. They look pissed."

Six feet below him in the elevator shaft, hanging from a rappelling line, one of Commander Galen's security sailors levered the door to deck 14 open with his crowbar, only to spin aside cursing. Half a second later, lead and pulse rounds slammed through the doorway, along with an ill-fated grenade that bounced off the far shaft wall and down the tube a ways before exploding harmlessly.

The wolf and his security teams didn't miss a second. Galen grabbed onto a ventilation duct's mesh door, planted his footpaws against the shaft wall, curled his claws into the mesh, and yanked with all of his considerable frame. The vent grate shrieked, its bolts ripping free, before he tossed it aside to clatter down into the darkness. Two seconds later, the male behind him slithered into the duct and shoved his rifle down through the corridor's ceiling vents, firing off a pair of grenades from his underslung launcher.

"Sir, clear for now, but there's gonna be more of em!"

Galen made no verbal answer, rappelling down two more kicks before landing in the corridor, alongside the Sailor who had initially opened it and dodged aside. As the Sailor covered him, Galen unhooked, then fell into a crouch, scanning the long steel hallway with his rifle.

Ten meters down, a trio of Junta Marines lay dead, blasted away from one another and internally liquefied by the grenades that had exploded altogether too nearby. Galen briefly thought back years to his boarding action combat training. Grenades were extremely lethal in these enclosed confines, their kill radius vastly increased by the armored walls that would funnel their blasts. Thus, they were not going to be commonly used except as traps.

In the shadow of flickering orange emergency lights, he saw a shadow move seconds before the sound of tromping boots, as his squad of security Sailors rappelled in, detached themselves from the lines, and brought their rifles up. He walked forward, opening fire as the first enemy Marine came around the corner with his rifle up to his chin, catching him in the face and blasting his brains all along the far wall. With the precision of hard-trained ship-board combat specialists, his Sailors streamed forward as he covered them, sliding their rifles around the corner to pour fire onto Marines heading to investigate the grenade blasts.

Galen waited for a break in the return fire, and threw his muscular lupine frame into a dead-out run, sprinting across the four-way intersection.

"Clear and move up, we'll fort up at the target area," he barked out, as he followed the map he'd once memorized, turning another corner in time to throw himself flat as a half-dozen Marines came around a corner further down, shouting and bloodied. He almost opened fire, heart thundering, when he saw their unit patches.

"Friendlies front, Marines! Get over here! Sit-rep!"

As he stood, the startled Marines rushed forward, rifles dropping down then coming back up, firing around him as the big wolf threw himself flat, perforating a pair of enemy soldiers as they exited a hatch behind him.

"Sir, gotta keep your head down sir!" one yelled, ripping off his helmet and plonking it down on Galen's head. Someone else grabbed him, and Galen followed his lead, moved quickly to the center of the Marine's fire group, as his sailors rounded the corner. Suddenly, his numbers had swollen from eleven to twenty-five. The black wolf grinned, and gave a quick look around, seizing the arm of the highest-ranking Marine present.

"Lieutenant, we're moving to the Hydraulics room!"

The Lieutenant blinked up at him, half a head shorter than Galen, a brown wolf with a recently ragged ear dripping blood down his collar. The wolf's tail looked shot to hell too, and he winced in sudden pain as it tried to flag up.

"Sir, I have to advise against that! The enemy are streaming through that area trying to cut down to Engineering from above! They outnumber us like twelve to one or something!"

Enemy fire, coming around corners with much the same tactic his own Sailors had used, mostly struck without effect on his own peoples' advanced nano-material armor. For about the thirtieth time that day, Galen found himself thanking the Navy Gods for putting him on an experimental ship full of cutting-edge equipment.

Galen saw the whites in the Lieutenant's eyes, and a quick glance told him what he needed to know, from the studiously blank looks of his NCO's and the angry faces of his enlisted Marines. The Commander grabbed the butter-bar by his lapel, straightened him up with a flex of biceps, and shouted at his best parade-ground roar as Marines opened fire behind and in front of him, taking down enemy troops who were streaming their way in increasing numbers.

"We have better armor and better troops! If we lose this area, we lose the Fist! Pull your fucking BALLS back on, Leatherneck! Or is what I've heard about the courage of Marines a fucking sack of shit!?"

Commander Forza wasn't one to berate people, or to yell, when his cool, rich baritone making simple requests was so often enough to get the job done. That didn't mean he was incapable of the sort of roaring orders that sang in the ancestry of the Navy and the Marine Corps, called to their spiritual predecessors, summoned up the spirit of dauntless courage they carried with pride.

The Lieutenant straightened up, his ear and a half perking forward, as the steel came back into his eyes.

"Lead the way, sir. We'll retake Hydraulics or die trying."