Green Shield
Posted on 05 Mar 2021 @ 4:13pm by Corporal Syimmi & Major Declan Finn
Mission:
M1 - Emergence
Location: Outside of Main Engineering
Timeline: Following "The Rally"
1227 words - 2.5 OF Standard Post Measure
“Try them again, Mark,” Captain Declan Finn said, rapping Corporal Mark Ingstrom hard on the top of his helmet. “Skipper, XO, anyone in the CIC staff. Get me someone,” he ordered sharply, probably more so than he needed to be.
Things weren’t exactly going well, and they’d just taken a turn for the worse. Corporal Minton had just radio’d in from one of the interior Engineering teams to report that their enemy was regrouping. He wasn’t quite sure what their numbers might be, or if they had found a way to reinforce themselves from the outside. Declan had zero idea what the situation was in the surrounding space. For all he knew, the Starfleet ships could have been destroyed and they were literally the last holdouts. Ingstrom’s inability to raise Captain DeHavilland or anyone else in the command staff that had extracted from the CIC wasn’t helping. Out of sheer frustration, he used his own short-range comm to try and connect with Sergeant Eindorf, to no avail.
Finn had personally led the great majority of the Marine contingent out of their makeshift barracks area in the Cargo Bay and made their way EVA up the central shaft of the station. Just as the enemy had taken them by surprise, breaching the hull of the station and making a hard run at Engineering, they’d surprised the enemy who had not been expecting to meet the resistance of nearly a full battalion of MP’s. Not to mention the latent resistance from the Combat Engineering company inside engineering.
They had used the element of surprise to push the boarders back from main engineering and into the exterior corridors above and below. The problem was, the pushback was easy, the holding of it wasn’t so simple. There might have been a battalion of them but it was a lot of deck to cover and there wasn’t a whole lot of latent cover for his Marines to dig in behind. They were having to make due with supply crates and having to purposely damage corridors and bulkhead doors to make barricades and fixed weapon emplacements. Dug in as they were, Finn still wasn’t one-hundred percent confident they could repel a full assault.
Now Minton was telling them that was exactly what was going to happen. That meant he needed to double-check that everyone was ready, and as much as he didn’t want to use it, make sure they had a line of retreat. They couldn’t afford to stand on their confidence and be completely without an option if they truly were overrun. When Ingstrom shook his head at him again that he still couldn’t raise the skipper, or anyone else, Finn heaved a sigh. Resigning himself to the inevitable that was about to come.
“Dig in here,” he ordered Ingstrom, “I’m going to go and check on 3rd squad. Anything comes down that corridor, you raise holy hell,” he ordered, getting up into a crouch and then shuffling down the corridor and turning. He didn’t walk upright until he was sure he was protected by bulkhead and trotted down the corridor to where 3rd squad was holed up with one of the squad assault weapons. The darn thing could do some major league damage, but it ran out of charge relatively fast and they only had a few extra charge packs each. That meant they needed to be sure to make full use of its bark, since they didn’t have much bite to spare.
Finn squatted down just before the corridor opened and crept in behind their unit, stacked behind some upturned crates and a bulkhead door that they’d roughly welded to the bulkhead. “Anything?” Finn asked as he shuffled in, covering himself behind a crate just in case.
“Nothing stirring, Captain.” Jamie Nathans had a higher powered sensor scope package on the phase canon, but half of the readouts were blacked out with interference error messages. A set of lifesigns came up as moving blips. “Wait, someone incoming—” There was a small radio signal readout and the scanner identified four friendlies just before they came around the distant corner in a mad dash. Three on the floor, and one less conventionally on the ceiling. “It’s Zebrov’s team.” Nathans stated the all-too-obvious. The team paused in the T-junction, turning around to level fire behind them. “And they’ve brought company.”
Suddenly there was a pulse and everything blinked out with an electronic sigh— the phase cannon readouts, the HUDs sensors, tricorders.
The sound of every rifle being brought to bear in the place was a united cacophony of snapping and slapping hardware and boots.
The electronics blackout led to a lightshow only a breath after as some of the riflemen with the keenest god-given eyesight picked out the first movement in the onrush through multiple corridors. The lancing of weapons fire sparked to a halt against mobile screens of energy emitted from hoversled mounted generation units for just such purpose. Behind the defensive screening the absorbed phaser fire illuminated well armored troops- their less sophisticated companions had long since been shifted from their number. Each one of these units clearly had some type of ranking, the shoulders of their suits delineated with troop markings. These were professional mercenaries.
Nathans was attempting to reboot the phase cannon, routing to manual, and gave it an enthusiastic smack in the side of the casing when it hummed back to life. But with the futility of his fellows’ rifle work he held off on wasting the shot, instead he took an emergency smoke signal from the kit to test something out, lobbing it generally in the direction of the quickly closing mercenaries in his corridor. The canister bounced off a wall and whirred around in a spiral of smoke… smoke that was also blocked by the energy shielding.
Zebrov’s team dashed through the smoke, each of them diving behind the relative safety of the welded cover plates. Syimmi dropped like a spider from the ceiling, flipping upright mid fall.
Dropping back behind cover beside Captain Finn, Nathans looked disconcerted with his discovery. It wasn’t only the laser rifles being reflected off those shields. They were going to repel bullets and grenades just as well. “It’s energy and particle shielding.” He explained to the Captain.
Shouting across Engineering could be heard as the mercenaries in the adjacent corridor overran the Marine dug out and strains of “fall back!” were discernible through the comm static.
“You, with me,” Captain Finn barked, rapping Syimmi alongside one segmented arm as he turned and headed down the corridor the way he’d come, his weapon up and at the ready. The shouts and cries were loudest from that section, filling with a sense of dread and the mixed miasma of emotions that came with having just left that position and having wished he’d been there to help stop the surge but at the same time well aware that had he been, he might be dead. “First squad to second positions!” he cried out through the general comm, “Kaplan, do you copy?!” he called into the short-wave comm’s, adding his own weapons fire to the din as he advanced on his former position.