It shouldn't work this well. We've never trained this specific scenario. Never drilled back-to-back corridor defense. But her body remembers something my mind keeps trying to catalog and categorize, the way we move together, the rhythm of it, call and response and call again, and the combat geometry of two people who fit.
A Vex soldier rushes our position with a vibro-blade, close enough that rifle fire is too slow. I read his approach, the angle of the blade, the trajectory of his lunge, and I rotate left. Astra fills the space I vacated, bringing the stock of her rifle up into his face with a crack that sprays blood across the deck, and I use the rotation's momentum to fire past her shoulder into the two fighters behind him.
She doesn't flinch from the shot that passes inches from her ear. She trusts me not to miss.
Close combat, brutal and efficient, and the corridor fills with the sounds and smells of it. Grunting and screaming and the wet percussion of bodies hitting deck plating. Gun oil and blood and the acrid scorch of overheated charge packs. My boots slip on something I don't look down to identify.
They keep coming. We keep killing them.
Minutes or hours, the difference collapses in sustained combat, until the corridor has become a charnel house of black-armored bodies and spent charge packs and a red haze in the air that might be emergency lighting or might be aerosolized blood. My team fights in knots of two and three, covering each other, falling back and pushing forward, and at the center of it Astra and I hold position with our backs pressed together and the dead accumulating at our feet.
The last Vex through the ceiling drops into a corridor that no longer has any fight left in it for him. He takes one look at the bodies, at the two of us standing in the middle of it, at the weapons pointed at his chest, and he raises his hands.
I zip-tie him. Shove him toward the maintenance alcove with the others. My hands are finally not steady, a fine tremor running through the muscles that I can feel but no one can see, and I press my palms flat against my thighs until it passes.
Astra's breathing hard beside me. Her rifle hangs from its strap. Her hands are shaking too, and she doesn't hide it.
The corridor holds. The bodies pile up. Neither of us stops.
Chaos finds its rhythm,which is the most dangerous thing about extended combat. You start to believe the pattern will hold, that the next push will look like the last one, that you know the shape of the violence coming for you.
You're always wrong.
The next assault fragments our line. Not a coordinated push but a wave of individual fighters, fast and dispersed, flooding the corridor from three access points simultaneously. My team scatters to cover all three, and in the fracture, I lose sight of Astra.
I'm at the secondary barricade when I hear the volume of fire shift. Not toward me. Toward the maintenance junction on the east side, where the corridor opens into a wider service area with less cover and worse sight lines.
Astra is there. I can feel it before I confirm it visually, something in the quality of the gunfire, the particular cadence of her rifle. She's surrounded, separated from cover by twenty feet of open deck, and the Vex are closing the gap from two directions.
I have a clear path forward. The corridor ahead of me is contested but navigable, and it leads to the life support bulkhead, my tactical objective, the thing Zane told me to protect above all else. If I push forward now, while the Vex are focused on the secondary positions, I can reach the bulkhead and fortify it. Secure the mission.
She's not on that path.
For one heartbeat, I feel it. The old math, cold and clean and merciless, spinning up in the back of my skull like an engine that's never been turned off, just idling. The probability matrices. The resource allocation. The calculus of expendable versus essential that I was trained to perform before I was trained to do anything else.
My tactical objective: eighty percent chance of success ifI move now. Her survival, alone and exposed with enemies closing: thirty percent, and that's generous, and I know exactly how generous because I've run numbers like these before.
I've run numbers exactly like these before.
Six years ago. Different station. Different corridor. Same math. And I made the correct decision, the tactically sound decision, and seventeen people died including three I could have reached in time if I'd chosen them over the objective.
The math was right. The math was always right. And I've been carrying the weight of that rightness like a stone in my chest ever since, smooth and cold and perfectly calculated.
The engine spins. The numbers arrange themselves.
I silence it.
Not a gradual fade, not a reasoned argument against the calculation. I shut it down the way you shut down a reactor, with force, with finality, with the understanding that what powers you can also poison you. The probabilities collapse into noise. The cold clarity goes dark.
I turn away from the life support corridor. I turn toward her.
The twenty feet between us might as well be twenty miles. Vex fighters between me and the maintenance junction, their focus split between the barricade positions and the isolated target in the open service area. I fire as I move, not aimed shots but suppressive bursts that force heads down and open a seam in their line.
A round catches me in the left side, below the ribs. The impact spins me half a turn, and the pain arrives a full second later, hot and deep and wrong in a way that my body recognizes as serious even if my mind refuses to process it. Not fatal. I know the difference. This is meat andmuscle, not organ. Bleeds like fury and hurts like judgement, but I'll live.
I keep moving. The seam in their line closes behind me, and now I'm in the same kill zone she is, which the math would call compounding error and I call being exactly where I need to be.
She's behind a support column that gives her maybe forty percent cover, firing controlled bursts at the fighters closing from the east. Her wound is bleeding again, visible even in the red light, a dark stain spreading along her left side. She hasn't stopped shooting.
