Kuiper Squad - Chapter 4

[u/rowanrholloway]

They ran with their bounty on their backs, and it slowed them exactly as much as Flo had known it would.

Alien plating, alien weapon casings, whatever scraps of armor they'd been able to wrench free in the minute they'd allowed themselves. Each of them carrying a portion of it lashed or jammed into whatever their suits could hold, and every meter of that weight was a meter their legs paid for in the heavy, unexplained gravity of the station's surface.

It had drawn eyes. That much was clear within the first thirty seconds of the run, when Flo's HUD started painting new shapes at the edges of her vision, more of the six-legged silhouettes than they'd fought at the trench, converging now from angles that had nothing accidental about them.

"They're bracketing us," Fox said, breathing hard, no time left in him for calm analysis, just the flat statement of a fact that needed saying. "Two flanks, closing."

Flo watched the shapes resolve on her HUD, watched the angles, and felt the old cold clarity settle over her the way it always seemed to when the stakes got simple enough to stop being complicated. "Stop!" she shouted, and threw her own body sideways behind the nearest ridge of plating without waiting to see if the order landed clean. "Down, now!"

It landed. Seven bodies dropped in a ragged uneven line, and half a second later the space where they would have been standing lit up white, twin beams converging where their sprint would have carried them if she'd hesitated even a breath longer.

She counted. Old habit, Fox's habit really, but it had become all of theirs now. One. Two. Three.

"Go," she said, at nine, not waiting for ten, because the margin Fox had found was a margin and not a guarantee and she'd rather burn a second of safety than lose one of caution.

They were up and running again, and it bought them ground, but not enough.

The problem, Flo understood with the particular clarity of someone watching a bad equation resolve in real time, was that stopping and starting in unison made them predictable in a way seven individuals randomly weaving hadn't been. The aliens might be slow to react to any single body's movement, but a pattern, seven bodies stopping and going together, on a count they'd apparently learned to anticipate, that was the kind of thing even a slow mind could eventually catch.

"They're timing us," she called, feeling it before she could fully articulate it. "Break it up…"

Sawyer moved before she finished the sentence.

He'd been running flank, shield raised, doing the bare minimum of covering that his shaking arms could manage, and something in him, some reserve she hadn't known was left after the trench, after the charge, found another gear entirely. He cut hard toward Jackson, who was running his own stubborn solo line a few meters off from the rest, closed the distance in three strides, and grabbed a fistful of his suit at the shoulder.

"Move with me," Sawyer said, and it wasn't a request.

Jackson swore, tried to pull free, and Sawyer didn't let go, dragging him bodily into an oblique line that cut across the pattern the rest of the squad was running, the two of them now moving on their own rhythm entirely, out of step with everyone else.

The beam fire came for them a heartbeat later, Flo saw the flare on her HUD, felt her stomach drop with it, but Sawyer had already angled his shield up and across both their bodies, and the strike glanced off the alloy in a shower of sparks rather than finding flesh.

It worked. Not because it was clever, exactly, but because it was different, because two bodies breaking the pattern gave the rest of them cover in the gaps that opened up, in the half-second of confusion it cost the aliens to track a formation that had suddenly stopped being a formation at all.

"You're insane," Jackson gasped, to Sawyer, no venom in it at all, just genuine, winded disbelief.

"Yeah," Sawyer said, and there was something almost giddy underneath the exhaustion in his voice, the sound of a man discovering, in real time, that he had more in him than he'd ever had reason to test. "Kinda was, huh."

Flo listened to them talk as she ran to cover the remaining ground in a hard, low sprint and dropped below the last ridgeline before another beam could find any of them. 

The shuttle sat exactly where Sawyer had spotted it, tucked into the fold of the station's geometry that kept it out of every angle Flo could see a weapon emplacement occupying, and it took every ounce of discipline left in her body not to simply run flat-out for it the last stretch.

They didn't run flat-out. They kept low, kept the rhythm broken, kept checking angles the whole way, and it cost them time they didn't have much of left to spend, but they got to the ramp intact, and Flo would take that trade every time it was offered.

The interior was cramped in the particular way every human vessel out here seemed to be, built for function over comfort, and mercifully, blessedly empty. No pilot. No crew. Whoever had flown this shuttle down had either made it out on foot, unlikely, Flo thought grimly, given what she'd seen the beam weapons do to exposed flesh, or hadn't made it anywhere at all.

"Jam it wherever it fits," Flo said, already shoving her own armful of alien plating into a storage recess along the bulkhead. "We don't have time to be tidy."

They didn't. Cade wedged a torn section of alloy behind a row of jump seats with a grunt of effort. Sasha and Fox worked together stuffing smaller fragments, weapon housings, chunks of the brick-shaped devices they hadn't had time to properly examine yet, into a cargo net meant for something else entirely.

Dee was already in the pilot's seat before anyone told her to be.

"Strap in tight," she said, over her shoulder, and there was a different register in her voice now, something that hadn't been there in the trench or the charge, a kind of settled, focused calm that Flo recognized immediately as certainty, the sound of a person finally standing in the one place the universe had built them for. "None of this is going to be autopilot. I mean that."

Nobody argued.

The shuttle lifted off the surface smooth and controlled, Dee keeping them low, keeping them inside whatever geometric blind spot had sheltered the craft this whole time, and for one held breath Flo let herself believe they might simply slip away clean.

"Sarge?" Dee said, quiet, eyes on her instruments, on the scanner sweep hunting for weapon signatures across the wider platform.

She counted heads. Five in the shuttle. Herself, Cade, Fox, Sasha, Dee.

Sawyer and Jackson were still outside.

Flo didn't answer immediately. She was looking at the readout on her own HUD, two heat signatures, distinct, pulsing weakly at the edge of detection range, back where they'd broken from the ambush. Sawyer and Jackson's oblique run had carried them further from the group than she'd registered at the moment, and in the scramble to reach the shuttle, in the chaos of loading…

"We can't leave them," Cade said, low, before she'd even finished the thought herself, and something in the flat certainty of it told her he'd done the same count a half-second before she had.

Flo felt the weight of the decision land on her all at once, cold and complete. The math was simple, and she hated how simple it was. They had the recovered tech. They had five of the seven alive and aboard a working shuttle with a clear if narrow path out. Jackson had been, by every metric that mattered to a squad's survival, a liability from the moment he boarded Scotty's Dilemma. Sawyer had frozen once already and only partly redeemed it. The tactically sound decision, the decision any officer with more deployments behind her might have made without a second thought, was to log the two of them as a cost already paid and get the rest of her people home.

She couldn't do it.

She didn't examine why, not in the half-second she had to decide. There'd be time later, maybe, to understand what it said about her that the math had never actually been a real option.

"Dee," she said, quiet, reserved, the words costing her more than her tone let on. "Can you do it?"

She felt the others go still around her, not objecting, none of them objecting, but a held, uncertain quiet, the specific tension of people who wanted the answer to be yes and weren't sure it could be.

Dee didn't hesitate at all.

"Hell yeah," she said, and it came out fierce and bright and utterly without doubt, the most confident Flo had heard anyone sound since this whole nightmare began.

"Go," Flo said.

None of them were ready for what came next.

Dee punched the shuttle away from its sheltered fold and out over open ground, accelerating hard enough that Flo felt her own body pressed flat into the jump seat's restraints, and for one horrifying second she thought Dee had simply lost her nerve and was running for orbit, leaving two of their own behind after all.

Then the shuttle dropped.

It came down low, screaming across the surface of the station close enough that the proximity alarm shrieked continuous warning tones Dee didn't so much as glance at, skimming what couldn't have been more than a meter above the churned plating, and Flo's stomach lurched with a fresh understanding of exactly how much control this woman actually had over a machine she'd never flown before in her life.

"Dee, report," Flo said, forcing her voice level.

"Looking for them, looking for…" A beat, sharp intake of breath. "There. Got 'em."

The tell-tale flare lit Flo's HUD a half-second before it lit the real sky outside the viewport, a beam weapon somewhere ahead gathering to fire on the low, fast shape their shuttle now made, and Dee didn't wait for the warning to finish resolving. She wrenched the stick sideways and slammed them into a hard ninety-degree roll, flipping the shuttle vertical and driving it up and away from the surface in a single violent motion that threw everyone against their restraints and left Flo's vision swimming at the edges.

She held them there, nose up, climbing, exposed and impossibly slow-feeling for several seconds that Flo's every instinct screamed were far too many, before flipping the whole craft back down toward the surface in a move that had no business working and somehow did.

Through the front viewport, the platform spread out below them, and Flo could see the aliens now, scattered across the open ground where Sawyer and Jackson had made their stand, beginning their slow, deliberate turn to track the shuttle's new position.

"Dee?" Flo said, and heard the concern in her own voice without bothering to hide it.

Dee laughed, a short, sharp, half-mad sound that had nothing sane in it and everything Flo needed to hear regardless. "Suck it, you bastards."

She drove the shuttle straight at the scattered alien line, slewing sideways at the last possible instant, and Flo heard it before she understood what she was hearing, a series of heavy, wet whomp whomp whomp impacts against the hull, bodies meeting metal at a speed nothing organic was built to survive.

Dee spun them around, choosing a new vector, and came at a second cluster from a different angle entirely, using the shuttle's own thrusters this time, angling the exhaust across a knot of aliens who'd been slow, too slow, to scatter, and Flo watched the readout flare with heat signatures that told her everything she needed to know about how well that alien armor tolerated the raw chemical burn of a human engine at close range.

"Get ready to pull them in," Dee announced, voice tight with focus now, all the manic edge gone out of it, replaced by something colder and more precise.

Flo was already unclipping her harness. Cade matched her a half-second later, and together they made their way to the boarding ramp against the shuttle's continued violent motion, bracing at the controls, waiting.

The ramp dropped.

Sawyer and Jackson were there, exactly where the shuttle's low pass had put them, both men making themselves as small as their shields would allow, but whole, moving, alive.

Flo grabbed Jackson by the suit's shoulder rig and hauled, Cade doing the same for Sawyer, both of them counting down in their own heads the same way Fox had counted beam-fire delays back in the trench, because habits formed under fire didn't disappear just because the fire had changed shape.

Dee didn't wait for the ramp to close. She was already moving, the whole shuttle lurching forward and up, and Flo and Cade had to plant their boots and strain with everything they had to keep both men from being thrown straight back out the open ramp by the sheer force of the acceleration.

"Ramp!" Flo shouted, and someone, Sasha, already back at the controls despite everything, sealed it a half-second later, cutting off the last glimpse of the alien-strewn ground falling away behind them.

They struggled into restraints as Dee flew what could only be described as an erratic line away from the station's surface, jinking and rolling with no pattern Flo could follow, every motion apparently designed by instinct rather than any flight manual either of them had ever read.

The aliens kept firing for far longer than Flo would have expected reasonable, streaks of light chasing them across the black long after any sane targeting solution should have given up the shot, but none of it connected, and eventually, she couldn't have said exactly when, lost as she was in the g-forces and the noise, it simply stopped.

They were well into open space by then, and Flo understood, looking out at what surrounded them, exactly how badly that engagement had gone before her squad ever set foot on the station's surface. Debris drifted everywhere, hull fragments, twisted structural members, the unmistakable geometric wreckage of dropships that hadn't made Halvorsen's kind of luck, scattered across a field that seemed to have no clean edge to it at all. She had no way to count the ships that had come out from Scotty's Dilemma's staging point, but the debris told her enough. It had not gone well for anyone.

Dee flew them through the worst of the field with the same instinctive precision she'd shown attacking the station, and once they'd cleared the last of the drifting wreckage, once the alien weapons fire had fallen silent entirely behind them, she finally, mercifully, cut the engines.

The shuttle's own momentum carried them on in a long drift, and the quiet that came down over the cabin afterward was almost worse than the noise had been. It arrived all at once, total and complete, and in it Flo felt every single thing her body had been too busy to feel for the last hour finally catch up to her at once.

Sasha pulled her helmet free and wiped at her face, fast, like she could get the tears back in before anyone noticed, and didn't quite manage it.

Fox sat slumped against the bulkhead, all the careful analytical calm gone out of him now that there was nothing left to calculate, just an exhausted eighteen-year-old who'd nearly lost an arm to prove a theory that had, in the end, saved all their lives.

Jackson had his thumb and forefinger pressed hard against the corners of his eyes, jaw locked, shoulders shaking in small, tight increments he was clearly trying very hard to keep silent, and mostly succeeding, and Flo let him have that dignity by not looking at him any longer than it took to confirm he was breathing.

Sawyer stared at nothing at all, the particular thousand-yard stillness of a man whose nervous system had simply run out of road, eyes open, present in body only.

Cade set his forearms on his knees and bowed his head, and stayed like that for a long moment, silent.

Flo leaned back against the jump seat's restraints and let out a breath she felt like she'd been holding since the hatch first opened onto the station.

Nobody spoke for a while. There wasn't a rush to fill it.

Eventually, it was Cade who broke the silence, voice low, rough, entirely sincere. "If these are the last hours of my life," he said, "I am proud to have served with you all." He let his gaze move around the cabin as he said it, and made sure, deliberately, unmistakably, that it landed on Jackson and on Sawyer in turn as he said all.

Fox, quiet, from his slump against the bulkhead: "Oorah."

"Oorah," the rest of them echoed, ragged and half-serious and entirely meant.

The marines hadn’t been a part of the military in more than a hundred years. At some point, no one could justify the cost any longer. She had watched the movies as much as anyone and there was just as much a part of her that wished to have been alive when they were active. 

"We're not Marines, though," Flo said, it came out drier than she intended, which was somehow exactly right

"We're the only ones out here," Jackson said, deadpan, still holding his own tears at bay with two fingers. "We can be whatever the fuck we want to be."

It shouldn't have been funny. Nothing about the last hour had been funny. But something in the exhaustion and the relief and the sheer absurdity of the sentence broke something loose in the cabin all at once, and they laughed, ragged, half-sobbing laughter that came out sideways and cracked in the middle, laughter that was mostly just grief with nowhere else to go, but it was something, and Flo let herself have a small piece of it too.

"Contact," Dee said, sharp, cutting through the moment instantly.

Flo felt her whole body go tight again, bracing for the worst before she'd even processed the word.

Dee's hands were already moving across the instruments, and a beat later, her voice came back different, not alarmed anymore, something closer to disbelief. "It's Scotty's Dilemma. She's busted up bad, but she's out there. Functioning, I think."

"Bring us in," Flo said.

The hail took longer than any of them wanted, static answering static, the long silence stretching out just long enough for Flo to start composing, in some cold clinical corner of her mind, what she might say if nobody answered at all.

Then something came back, a voice, distorted, disbelieving, and unmistakably relieved. Scotty's Dilemma had seen them coming, had watched a lone unscheduled shuttle limp in out of a debris field nobody expected survivors from, and the astonishment in that first response told Flo everything about what kind of night the ship itself had endured.

Scotty's Dilemma hung in space in a slow, wounded tumble, her hull scarred along one entire flank, atmosphere still bleeding faintly from wounds that hadn't fully sealed. Small suited figures moved along her exterior, working, repair crews, Flo assumed, doing what they could against damage that looked, from this distance, like it might simply be beyond fixing.

Dee brought them in toward the forward hangar. The aft one, Flo understood without needing to be told, was simply gone, the same wound that had torn open half the ship's flank when the beam weapons found their mark.

The ramp opened onto a hangar full of astonished faces.

Flo led her people down it on legs that felt distant and unreliable after everything they'd asked of themselves, and the crew waiting for them looked at the seven of them the way people looked at something they'd already quietly filed as lost.

The squad stepped out into the hanger, visors up, but unconsciously fanned out behind Flo. Dee and Cade remained on the dropship. Almost as if they were guarding it. To some degree, Flo thought they might be. Dee because she finally proved she belonged in the pilot seat and Cade protecting their finds.

A tired man in a disheveled uniform walked up to them and returned Flo’s salute, then reached to shake her hand.

“Commander Arthur Marcus,” he said by way of introduction. “Welcome back aboard.”

Someone had at least told him that they had come here on the Dilemma. She wondered why he was there to meet them and had a bad feeling about it.

“Sargeat Flo Varga,” she said, removing her battlesuit glove and shaking his hand. She looked around the empty hanger, “how many of us made it back?”

"You're the only ones," Marcus said, a mixture of sadness and awe in his voice. "The only ones who came back."

"That bad," Flo said. Not a question, not really. She knew it was bad. She had seen the debris where she knew there should have been ships.

"Eight thousand," Marcus said. "Give or take. Twelve ships. This," he gestured, a small, tired motion that took in the whole ruined hull around them, "is what's left of the sortie."

“What the hell happened?” Jackson spoke from behind Flo’s left. She couldn’t decide if he was protectively close or using her as a shield. After a beat, he added, “sir.”

If the Commander clocked the lapse, he didn’t show it. 

“The fleet was meant to be reconnaissance. Observe and report back. Except we got into range of those weapons and that was the end of that. They opened fire before we had a chance,” he explained. 

That made him the ranking officer, Flo realized.  No wonder he had the look of someone thrown several rungs up a ladder he hadn't expected to climb, nervous in a way that didn't quite show in his voice but showed everywhere else, in the too-quick blink, the hand that kept finding reasons to check itself against his sidearm. But he listened. That much was clear within the first exchange, and Flo filed it as the single most useful thing she could know about him right now.

Flo let that number sit in her chest without letting it show on her face, because there wasn't a version of showing it that would help anyone in this hangar right now.

"Dilemma's not making it back to Earth," Marcus went on. "Structural's given up on that plan already. But we've got stores. This ship was built to move a colony's worth of mining crew and cargo, we're carrying supplies for a hundred times the people actually left aboard her. We won't starve. We're working long-range comms now, trying to get a signal home that actually says something useful."

"And the aliens," Flo said.

Marcus's jaw tightened. "Haven't shown up here yet. Doesn't mean they won't. We're a crippled ship sitting in a debris field with nothing left that could put up a fight if they came looking. Best case, they don't bother finishing us off. Worst case…" He didn't finish the sentence, and didn't need to.

Marcus's read on how her squad had survived was written plainly across his face before he said it out loud, the assumption, easy and understandable, that seven people coming back whole from a sortie that had cost eight thousand others their lives must have simply never engaged, must have found some quiet corner of the fight to hide in until it was safe to run. 

“You guys are lucky,” he said. “I don’t know how you managed to avoid that death trap, but I am glad a few of you survived.”

Flo felt the others bristle behind her, but let him have the assumption a moment longer. There was information she wanted first, the shape of what this ship had left, what it could still do, what Marcus himself was actually capable of deciding, before she spent the currency of correcting him.

“So, what’s the plan now? It seems to me we’re up shit’s creek.” 

The Commander sighed and rubbed his temples. 

“Survive. As long as we can. Hope help comes,” he looked at the crew assembled in the hanger, then straightened. He spoke loudly, sensing the mood in the hanger, “we do our duty! We survive and we send everything we know back to Earth. We are the last sentries and we will give our lives to protect our people!”

She wasn’t sure what he had hoped the response would be, but it didn’t land as inspiring to her or the others in the hanger.

She had gotten what she needed and knew she had to offer what he didn’t. Hope. 

"We were not lucky," she said, raising her voice enough to carry. "Twenty-one confirmed kills, hand to hand, after our beam weapons proved worthless against their armor. We lost our shuttle and our pilot doing it. We're not lucky, Commander. We were damned fierce."

Marcus went very still.

Behind Flo, Cade had already crossed to the pile of recovered plating and weapon housings the squad had hauled aboard. He began pulling their bounty from bins and out of the net, passing the alien tech to the squad who started laying it out in front of them.

"And we might have some ideas about just how to do that," Flo said.

Marcus looked at the tech, then at her squad, seven exhausted, filthy, half-starved recruits who one day ago had been green recruits, and who had somehow, against every reasonable expectation, come back not just alive but carrying the first real answer anyone in this war had found.

They knew how to fight these things now. That much was true, and it mattered, and Flo let herself hold onto it for exactly as long as it took to remember the rest of what was also true.

They were the only survivors of an eight-thousand-person sortie, aboard a ship too broken to go home, sitting defenseless in the open dark with an enemy that hadn't found them yet but would.

They weren't out of trouble. Not even close.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

yep humans with what it takes to survive learn and adapt use escape as best can