The third wave comes, and it is everything.
Thirty soldiers. Forty. The corridor fills with them, a tide of black tactical gear and muzzle flash, and my team fires and fires and it's not enough. The Vex push through our fire by sheer numbers, stepping over their own dead, and the barricade position begins to collapse.
I read three shooters simultaneously. Drop two. The third gets a round past my cover that takes a chunk out of the cargo container six inches from my face. Fragments pepper my cheek, hot and sharp, and blood runs into my collar.
"Fall back to secondary position." My team moves. Disciplined even now. We give ground, step by step, firing as we go, and the Vex take every meter we abandon like they're collecting debt.
Ninety seconds. The secondary barricade. We set up, but we're thinner now. Nine fighters, some bleeding, all running low on charge packs. The Vex are pushing the abandoned ram forward, using it as mobile cover, and behind it I can see reinforcements still flowing in from the junction.
The math tries again. I feel it like a muscle memory, the cold calculation spinning up: resources depleted, position degrading, probability of holding below actionable threshold.The smart move is tactical retreat to the life support bulkhead and a last stand at the door itself.
Sixty seconds to Zane's three-minute window. If help is coming, it has to come now.
The Vex push. We fire. Another of my people goes down, a debtor named Saris who I watched learn to shoot five days ago and who turned out to be terrifyingly good at it. Gut wound. She's still shooting, braced against the wall, her face the color of station concrete, and I know she won't be shooting much longer.
Thirty seconds.
The corridor shakes. Not from weapons fire. From something massive hitting the deck on the other side of the Vex formation. The emergency lighting flickers. The attacking soldiers hesitate, and some of them turn to look behind them.
What comes through the Section Nine junction is not a reinforcement squad.
It's Astra.
She's at the front of a column of twenty fighters, station security and armed debtors and what looks like three of Zane's personal guard, and she hits the Vex rear like a blade through the space between ribs. No warning. No announcement. Just violence, immediate and precise and executed with the kind of cold efficiency that makes my Empri senses light up like a corona.
I read her body from fifty meters away through a corridor full of smoke and muzzle flash. Every movement is intentional. No wasted energy, no hesitation, no fear in the architecture of her muscles. She fires, transitions, fires again, and the Vex rear formation folds around her like paper around a fist.
"Push forward." My voice carries over the chaos, andmy team responds. We advance from the secondary position, firing into the now-sandwiched Vex, and the corridor becomes a killing floor.
They breakin under a minute once they're caught between us. Some die fighting. Some try to retreat to the junction and find Astra's people have closed it off. Some throw down weapons and drop to their knees. The survivors, and there aren't many, are zip-tied and shoved into a maintenance alcove under guard.
The silence after sustained combat is never really silence. It's ringing ears and labored breathing and the groans of the wounded and the particular quiet of the dead. The corridor is a ruin. Scorched walls. Shattered light panels. Bodies in black tactical gear heaped like driftwood against the barricades.
Astra finds me at the midpoint of the corridor, where the abandoned breaching ram sits like a monument to something that almost happened. She's got blood on her face that I don't think is hers and a charge rifle slung across her back and she moves like the fight isn't over because, for her, it isn't. Her eyes are already scanning the junction, the corridor behind her, the maintenance access points. Cataloguing threats.
She stops two feet from me, close enough that I can see the pulse jumping in her throat.
"Sector Seven held."
The sentence hangs between us, too simple for what it carries. Zane's voice crackles in my earpiece with updates from other sections, casualty reports, structural damage assessments, Vex movement outside the hull. The station isholding. Barely, and at a cost that will take days to count, but holding.
"The junction." I point to the Section Nine access. "They'll regroup and try again. We need to?—"
"Already set charges on their side. Your demolitions team wired the approach. If they come back through there, they walk into it."
She thought ahead. While leading a counter-assault through contested corridors, she thought about what happens after. I feel something in my chest that isn't relief, isn't gratitude, isn't anything I have a clean word for. It's recognition. The particular shock of seeing someone operate at the level you've been alone at for too long.
We don't have time for what I'm feeling. We have time for what needs doing.
"Set a rotation. Four-hour watches on both approaches. Pull the wounded to the triage point in Section Six. Redistribute ammunition." Orders for my remaining team, who move to execute them with the mechanical obedience of people running on adrenaline fumes and discipline. Then, to Astra: "How did you get twenty fighters here? Zane said everything was committed."
"Everything official was committed." She wipes blood from her temple with the back of her wrist, and the smear it leaves looks like war paint. "I pulled the debtors running the secondary supply lines. Redistributed the loads to automated systems and freed up bodies. Then I walked into the Section Fourteen command post and took three of Zane's guards."
"Took them."
"Told them Sector Seven was falling and their boss's brother was in it. They volunteered." A pause. Somethingflickers across her face, there and gone. "You would have held without me."
"Not for much longer."
