They're here anyway.
I position myself at the center of the corridor, behind abarricade of welded cargo containers, and I open the part of my mind that I keep leashed in polite company.
The Empri ability isn't telepathy. People always get that wrong. It's more like reading a language written in muscle tension and micro-expressions and the electrical field of a nervous system running hot. When someone is about to shoot, their body knows before their conscious mind gives the order. I read the body. In close quarters, with enemies I can see, it means I know where the violence is going half a second before it arrives.
Half a second is a lifetime in a firefight.
The first wave comes through the Section Nine junction, fifteen Vex soldiers in matte-black tactical gear, their faces hidden behind rebreather masks that make them look like insects. They move well. Coordinated. Covering formation as they advance into the corridor.
I read the point man before he clears the doorway. His weight shifts left. He's going to sweep right. I put three rounds into the space his chest will occupy, and he walks into them like I hung them in the air for him.
The corridor erupts.
Muzzle flash in the red emergency lighting creates a strobe effect that turns everything into frozen frames of violence. My people fire from cover. The Vex return fire and advance. The first proximity charge detonates when three of them crowd the maintenance junction, and the concussion wave rolls down the corridor with a pressure I feel in my sinuses.
Two minutes. Three. The first wave breaks against our position and leaves five bodies on the deck plating. The survivors pull back, dragging their wounded, and I use the lull to check my team.
One dead. Koren, a station security officer with seventeenyears on Veridian-7 and a daughter in the residential ring who will learn about this in a few hours. A chest wound, clean through the armor's weak point at the shoulder junction. She bled out before anyone reached her.
Two wounded. Functional, but diminished.
"They're regrouping." Lev, one of the debtors, a young man with the kind of steady hands that made me trust him with the second barricade position. He's watching the junction through his scope. "I count twenty more. They're bringing something heavy."
I see it through the junction gap when the next formation begins to move. A breaching ram, military-grade, the kind designed to punch through reinforced bulkheads. If they get that to the life support door at the far end of this corridor, the bulkhead won't hold.
"Zane. They're escalating in Seven. Breaching equipment. I need reinforcements."
Static. Then: "Everyone's committed. Sections Nine and Fourteen are both under heavy assault. I'll get you what I can, but it won't be fast."
Not fast might mean not at all. The math starts itself without my permission. Sixteen hostiles visible, likely more behind them. My team is down to thirteen effective fighters. The corridor is fifty meters long with limited lateral movement. If they push with the ram, we have to stop it before it reaches the midpoint, or the momentum carries it through regardless of casualties.
Thirty percent chance of holding if they commit everything.
I kill the calculation before it finishes. Thirty percent or three hundred, we hold this corridor or the station suffocates.
"Copy. We'll manage."
The second wave hits harder. They come with the ram in the center, six soldiers bearing it like pallbearers carrying the ugliest coffin ever built, with ten more providing suppressive fire on either side. The noise is annihilating. Ricochets scream off the cargo containers. One of my people takes a round in the leg and goes down cursing.
I lean out of cover and read the formation. The ram team is disciplined, but they're vulnerable at the transition points where the corridor narrows. I call targets. My people fire. Two of the ram carriers drop, and the whole formation stutters.
They don't stop.
The ram keeps coming, four soldiers now, straining under the redistributed weight, and behind them the suppressive fire intensifies to a wall of sound and light that keeps my people's heads down.
I sight on the lead carrier and put two rounds into his knee. He folds. The ram lurches, tips, hits the deck plating with a sound like a bell made of nightmares. The remaining three carriers scramble, and for a moment the formation is chaos.
We pour fire into the gap. Four more Vex drop. The rest pull back, leaving the ram stranded in the middle of the corridor like a beached cetacean, and I allow myself one breath of relief before I hear the sound that ends it.
Boots. Dozens of them. Coming from the Section Nine junction. The third wave, and this one is bigger than the first two combined.
"Zane. Third wave incoming. Double the numbers." My voice is flat, which is the voice that means I've already accepted what's about to happen and moved past it into the clean space of pure function. "If you have anything to send, send it now."
Silence for two heartbeats. Then Zane, not flat, not calm, but controlled in the way that means he's moving pieces on a board only he can see: "Hold for three minutes. Help is coming."
Three minutes.
I reload. Redistribute my people. Push the two most wounded to the rear. Set the remaining proximity charge at the corridor's narrowest point and arm it for manual detonation, because I want to choose the moment.
