The honest answer, and she knows it. The corridor would have fallen. Life support would have been compromised. The station would have begun dying from the lungs outward, and I would have been one of the bodies on the floor, and the math would have been correct.
She changed the math.
The lull is a living thing,tense and trembling, lasting long enough for the medics to reach us but not long enough for anyone to pretend the fight is over.
Astra is checking her sidearm's charge pack when I see it. The way she shifts her weight off her left side. The careful economy of movement that means pain, managed but present.
"Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You're favoring your left. Sit down."
She looks at me, and for a moment I see the stubbornness that keeps her alive warring with the truth her body can't hide. The stubbornness loses. She lowers herself onto an overturned cargo crate, and when she lifts the hem of her tactical vest, I see the blood.
Her old wound. The one from the training incident, stitched and healing, now pulled open along a four-inch line that weeps red into the waistband of her pants. Not arterial. Not immediately dangerous. But in a station under siege, with medical resources already stretched past breaking, an open wound is an invitation to every infection the recycled air carries.
"The stitches pulled during close quarters." She says it the way she'd say the weapon jammed. A mechanical problem. A status update.
"You're hurt."
"I'm functional." She meets my eyes, steady and certain. "That's what matters."
She's right. In this corridor, with Vex regrouping outside the hull and the second push potentially minutes away, functional is the only category that counts. Not whole, not healthy, not safe. Functional.
I hate that she's right. I hate that this is the world I built around her, where "functional" is the bar and everything below it is acceptable loss. I hate that she learned the language so fluently.
I pull the field medical kit from my belt and crouch in front of her. She doesn't protest. I peel back the soaked bandage, clean the wound with antiseptic that makes her jaw tighten but draws no sound, and apply a fresh pressure seal that will hold until someone with actual medical training can restitch.
My hands are steady. They're always steady. It's the one mercy my biology gives me, steady hands whether I'm shooting or stitching or touching the skin just above her hip where the wound ends and she begins.
She watches my hands work. I watch her watch me.
"Thank you." Quiet. Not for the bandage.
I nod. Secure the seal. Stand up. The corridor is red-lit and ruined and smells like ozone and copper and the particular burnt-plastic stench of a station that's been shot from the inside. Somewhere, a damaged vent hisses like something alive and furious. My people are in position, tired and bloodied and holding.
The next push will come. It's a matter of when, not if.
When means nineteen minutes later.Enough time to redistribute the ammunition from the dead, reset the remaining proximity charge, and convince Saris to let the medics carry her to triage. Not enough time to sleep, eat, process, or feel anything that isn't sharp enough to keep me alive.
They don't come through the Section Nine junction this time. They've learned.
They come from above.
Maintenance shafts. The crawl spaces between deck levels that run through the station like capillaries, too narrow for heavy equipment but just wide enough for soldiers stripped to light armor.
The ceiling panel blows in twenty feet ahead of our barricade position, and two Vex drop into the corridor like spiders descending from a web. Then two more. Then three, from a different panel, further down. Then the junction assault begins simultaneously, because this was never two attacks. It was one attack with two mouths.
"Above and forward. Split fire." I'm already engaging the ceiling drop while my team handles the junction. Astra is beside me before I register her movement, her rifle tracking upward, and the first Vex who drops from the shattered panel catches her round in the throat before his feet touch the deck.
The corridor becomes close quarters almost instantly. The Vex from the ceiling panels are behind our forward barricade, and the ones from the junction are pressing the front, and we're compressed in the middle like something being chewed from both ends.
I read bodies. Two from the ceiling, one pivoting left,one going for the demolitions panel. I drop the one going for the panel. The second one gets three steps before Astra puts him down with a shot that punches through his faceplate.
We fall into it without discussion. Without planning. Our backs press together, and the geometry of the corridor becomes a sphere of coverage, her handling everything I can't see, me handling everything she can't. I feel her spine against mine. The shift of her shoulder blades when she sights. The recoil traveling through her body into mine when she fires.
My Empri sense reads the attackers, their intentions broadcasting through their bodies like light through cracked glass, and I call targets without thinking about it in a low voice that only she can hear. "Left, two meters, going for the panel. Right, crouching, grenade." She hears and responds, and the translation between my reading and her action is seamless, a fraction of a second between intention and execution.
