Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: System 1861, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Sarge, I really don’t…”

“It’s Sergeant not Sarge, Cooper, and I don’t care what you think.” SGT O’Neil snapped over TACCOM from a thousand kilometers away.

Coop knew he’d gotten to the calm and collected NCO because he’d never heard the man snap before. It just showed how tense the situation was.

“I respect that you’re the man in charge on the ground, but your mission is clear and unchanged.” The SGT rolled over any objections Coop might have. “You will secure the LZ and then scout ahead with your two uninjured men. Your injured man will stand guard on the shuttle while the pilot makes the necessary repairs. I will be on the next flight over once he does and will assume command.”

“Why the hurry? We can secure the area and wait for your arrival. There is no reason for me to go skipping off to wherever when we can maintain a firm posture here and wait for your arrival.” Coop still didn’t understand why they would want to send three guys against people who were already confirmed to have heavy ordinance.

“Follow orders, Cooper. O’Neil out.”

Coop sighed as he turned to look at his small team.

One was a PFC and the other was a PVT. The PFC had actually been in longer than Coop by a few months, but he wasn’t wearing a LACS, so he got a pass on running this shindig. A quick look at his record showed that was probably for the best. The most action this guy had seen were some bare titties at the strip club on New Lancashire.

Coop brought up the written transcript of the conversation that he’d just had. The key here was to follow the orders but not follow the orders and get his dick blown off for no reason. Coop couldn’t stop a grin from forming. Technically, the LZ was secured. Coop had led the team to clear the hangar bay of any enemy troops and booby traps before he radioed the SGT, but that was a technicality.

That was enough rational for Coop, and he double checked the manuals in his armor to verify his hunch about the multiple natures of ‘secure’.

“On me,” he commanded his troops with his new-found authority. “Here is what we’re going to do.”

Coop was able to eat up forty-five minutes of time creating not one, but two positions. There were plenty of supplies left around the bay to work with. The pirates, smugglers, and all around bad guys who’d occupied this place had left in a hurry and left a ton of crap. The first position Coop erected around the grounded shuttle. It was a half-moon of supplies stacked chest height and several meters thick. It wasn’t going to stop a lot, but it was better than nothing. Of course, only two people could work on it at a time. The third person needed to maintain security during the construction, and the same was true of the second position.

Coop put a little more effort into the second one. The first one was more to get something solid in place to cover people getting on and off the shuttle if there was a firefight in the open bay. Since the shuttle only handled Coop or the three normal grunts, they were fucked all the way until Sunday if that happened, so this second position was much more important. The bad guys couldn’t be allowed to break through this point. It was the real final defensive line.

“Clear.” One of the soldiers pivoted around the corner and scanned the area.

“Find cover and hold. You’re our eyes and ears.” Coop ordered as he picked up supplies and hurried to work.

There was a small vestibule – most likely for decontamination purposes – between the bay and the main station. It wasn’t big, so it was a great place to put the defensive position. It was a natural choke point the enemy would have to get through. There were a few more entrances to the bay, but they were single-person doors, and Coop had mined all of them with a big, jerry-rigged 125mm surprise. Then, he’d dialed those locations in as TRPs to bring down the hurt on anyone who tried to stick their dick in uninvited.

He built three layers into the vestibule’s fixed position. The first was a firing position in the hallway with enough cover for his whole team to return fire against the enemy. The hallway only went in one direction, so they angled the material to reduce their exposure.

“If we had a fabricator we could make this thing totally bad ass.” The other PFC stated as they lugged heavy polyplast containers filled with something illicit, but non-explosive, into position.

“I’ll keep my eyes open.” Coop hoisted the crate up on top of another crate to give them more cover. “Let’s start on the secondary position.”

The second of the three layers Coop had in mind was at the far end of the vestibule toward the bay. If they thought they were being overrun from their first position they could fall back – past two more 125mm shells Coop had rigged as impromptu mines –to the second line of defense. This one was shorter and made a half-moon shape in front of the door to the bay. It was shorter so they could be jumped over easily, and the soldiers would have to fire from the kneeling position.

The third and final position was through the door and to the left, which was purposefully in the direction of the shuttle. This position was just more abandoned supplies stacked on top of each other. It wasn’t meant to hold. It was designed to be utilized as a fallback position as the soldiers reverse bounded back toward the shuttle. They would be able to cover their buddies from there while they ran for it.

Coop hoped it didn’t come to that as he looked down at his watch. “That’s lunch boys, take fifteen.” They didn’t have food, but everyone had earned a quick breather except the guy on watch by the first position. He couldn’t take his eye off the ball.

“Cooper, give me a SITREP.” The SGT ordered just as Coop was going to pop a squat.

“The LZ is secure, Sergeant.” Coop replied proudly.

“And…”

“And…I’m giving the troops a quick breather after all the hard work they’ve been doing.” Coop put a little mock surprise in his tone. “We’ve created several fall-back positions in case we come under fire and need to hold the bay for emergency evac. I think you’ll agree once you’re on the ground with us that getting caught out in the open in the hangar bay is tactically unwise, so I’ve done my best to mitigate that risk.”

Coop tried not to sound like a smartass, but a hint of it couldn’t stop from lingering into his voice. Technically, he’d done nothing wrong, but SGT O’Neil had been in the game long enough to see what Coop was doing.

“Good work, Cooper. Securing the LZ is vital to our mission, but now that that is complete I expect scouting to begin immediately. The pilot says he should be underway in the next twenty minutes, so I will be there within the half hour. I expect you to have detailed plans of the station for at least one hundred meters outside of the bay by the time I arrive. Are we clear?”

“Crystal clear, Sergeant.” Coop put a burst of false motivation into the response before the SGT cut the line.

Coop thought as he rotated his shoulders and neck until his vertebrae popped in relief. He gave his troops five of their allotted fifteen minutes before getting back to work.

Coop and the PVT met the other PFC at the first line of defenses. “I haven’t seen anything.” The PFC shrugged and relaxed a little now that three of them were there.

“Ok, we’re going to push forward slow and steady,” Coop explained. “Any sign of anything we stop and evaluate. If we make contact, return fire and wait for my orders.” He wasn’t even sure what those orders would be yet.

He remembered from his training.

Coop took the first position as they moved forward. He was against one wall looking ahead at his sector of fire. The other PFC was moving with him along the other side of the wall and covering his sector. The PVT moved behind Coop and turned around every couple of steps to check the rear. It wasn’t an issue now with the hallway being a dead end, but it would be an important job once they worked their way farther into the asteroid.

Coop had done a ton of operations like this in training, and even in real life on cobalt Station. The key to it all was trust. He needed to trust the other soldiers to cover their sectors so he didn’t get shot. Even in HI armor he was vulnerable to certain weapons. This kind of operation was done best with guys who trained together for months or years; guys that had time to build that comradery and trust. If Coop was being honest, he didn’t trust these other guys. He was by no means an experienced veteran, and he didn’t want to be leading this team, but he’d seen twice as much shit as these guys put together. He desperately wanted to know how they’d react under fire, and the time to learn that was not coming under fire on this rock in the middle of bum-fuck space.

“Corner.” Coop announced as they came to a ninety-degree bend in the hallway.

The two guys moved to stack against Coop’s wall while he slid his muzzle around the corner. The feed from the rifle didn’t show anything, and his LACS neural network ran the imagery through every spectrum.

“Clear.” He stated when green blinked on his HUD. “Let’s move.” They moved around the corner and assumed the same positions.

“Door.” The other PFC announced halfway down the hallway.

“Stack up.” They moved along the same wall again.

Once they were ready, the PFC in the first position hit the panel to open it. “It’s locked. Utilizing bumper.” The little device came out of one of the soldier’s pouches.

It was a basic model meant to overload the basic security of doors. It wouldn’t work against anything heavily defended, but for a door in the middle of a random hallway it would do fine. The PFC attached it to the panel and hit the device with the palm of his hand. There was a low-pitched whine before the door slid open. The three soldiers moved in quickly each covering a separate part of the room. It didn’t matter, the room was empty.

Three “clears” rang out before they relaxed and headed back to the door.

Coop felt a little better after the clearing exercise. It showed him that these other guys seemed to know what they were doing. That little bit of trust helped, and then evaporated when the PVT just walked out of the door and back into the hallway.

Where he wasn’t alone.

At the end of the hallway was a big guy with a shaved, bald head, big, busy beard, and a big ass gun in his hands. It was so big he couldn’t brace it against his shoulder to fire. His biceps, triceps, and forearms strained as he held the circular weapon at his hip where green light gathered and pulsed.

Coop thought the PVT was a retard for just walking back into the unsecured hallway, but he had to give the guy credit. The PVT rounded on the big guy quickly and put three rounds within a few centimeters of each other on the guy’s chest. It was good shooting, and he painted the wall behind the guy with gore, but not before the entire hallway was bathed in green light as a ball of energy fired from the weapon. It was four times the size of a basketball and it hit the PVT square in the chest with a hideous sizzling sound.

TACCOM was filled with the sounds of the soldier’s screams as the blast ate through his armor and into his flesh.

“That’s a Maccabee plasma cannon,” the other PFC reached for the PVT, but Coop pulled him back.

The guy who fired the shot might be dead, but they didn’t know who else was out there, and so far everyone Coop had come up against in this place was packing heavy ordinance.

flashed through his mind as he assessed the situation. He concluded.

“Fall back to the corner,” he ordered.

They exited the room smarter than the dead PVT with their weapons pointed toward the enemy’s corpse. There was no movement, but Coop wasn’t taking any chances. He kept his finger on the trigger and Buss trained on the corner with one arm, while he grabbed the PVT by his armor’s collar and dragged him back to around the corner.

“Shit!” The other PFC was breathing hard and alternating between looking at the PVT and down the hallway.

“Eyes front and watch for targets!” Coop did his best impression of a drill sergeant while he tried to raise SGT O’Neil on TACCOM.”

“What do you have for me, Cooper?” The NCO sounded hurried.

“We’ve made contact and I’ve got a KIA. PVT Blackbird took a plasma cannon to the chest.” Coop kept his eyes on the other PFC’s feed from his rifle.

“May god have mercy on his soul.” The SGT sounded old and tired.

Coop thought.

“What’s you ETA, Sergeant? I’m down to just two combat-ready soldiers.”

“The shuttle is halfway back to Argo. I’ll be on the ground in twenty minutes tops. Hold your position, Cooper.”

Coop rolled his eyes.

“Roger that, I’ll see you soon.” Twenty minutes was a long time to wait.