The corridor outside the port collar ran narrow and close, the kind of ground that favored whoever held it first, cable runs exposed along both walls in the same tangled black ropes that seemed to run through every improvised battlefield this month had handed them, and Camaro's fire team had already dug in behind a hastily overturned equipment locker by the time the first breach charge blew the hatch inward in a spray of sparks and twisted alloy that scattered bright orange embers across the deck plating.
The Reza boarders came through fast and disciplined, exactly the way a crew trained on stolen Fleet doctrine would come through, sweeping the near corners first, calling clear in short clipped bursts that sounded, to Camaro's ear, unsettlingly close to her own training, the same clipped cadence she'd drilled into her own reflexes back before any of this had a name.
"They're checking the near corners like textbook says to," she called, low, to the two crew flanking her, her voice tight but steady. "Osei's right. They're running our own playbook. Don't give them the far corner the way the book tells you to expect it defended. Fall back one junction further than the manual says is smart."
The gambit bought them the opening heartbeat they needed, the lead boarder's angle catching empty corridor where Fleet doctrine would have placed a defensive line, his own hesitation at the unexpected gap costing him the half second Camaro needed to put him down clean with her good hand, the shot echoing hard off the exposed cable runs and the man crumpling without a sound.
"Two more behind him," Osei's voice cut through the comm, arriving at the junction himself a beat later with the same unhurried economy he brought to everything, his own weapon already tracking the second boarder's exposed flank. "They're calling for a specific target, Ensign. Listen."
Over the boarders' own tactical channel, bleeding faintly through the corridor's damaged comm relay, a voice cut through, sharp with command and something colder underneath it, an accent none of them had heard before, clipped and precise in a way that made every word land like a verdict already handed down. "The Marshal is the objective. Nothing else matters tonight. Commander Threll does not accept a failed extraction twice in the same month, and neither, gentlemen, do I."
"Threll," Alita repeated, arriving at the junction with a rifle she hadn't fired in earnest since Avaros, her voice tight, her knuckles white where they gripped the weapon's stock. "That's a name, not a rank alone. Whoever's leading this boarding party is running scared of someone specific, someone close enough to matter to them personally."
"Good," Taisen said, arriving a step behind her, his own presence settling the corridor's tension by a fraction even as his ruined hand stayed carefully still at his side, obeying, for now, the promise he'd made Swan and Lyn both. "A frightened commander makes mistakes a confident one wouldn't. Osei, hold this junction. Camaro, fall your team back to the second bulkhead and get ready to seal it the moment I give the word. Whatever Threll's people are willing to risk to make Malkor happy tonight, I intend to make certain it isn't worth what it costs them."
The second wave of boarders hit harder and faster than the first, Threll's own voice audible now over the open channel, sharp and cold and utterly without patience for the delay Camaro's improvised defense had already cost her. "The east junction, now, before that cutter finishes sealing its own bulkheads around us. I did not cross this far to be beaten by a crew running on instinct instead of a manual."
"She knows we've broken from the doctrine," Alita said, low, ducking behind cover as a fresh volley sparked off the corridor's exposed piping, the smell of scorched alloy sharp in the recycled air. "That's going to cost us the advantage fast if we don't find something else to read off her instead."
"Then read her," Taisen said, watching the fight unfold with the same cold, narrowing focus he brought to every read that mattered, and found it a moment later, the small telling detail Osei's own trained eye had already half caught: the boarders' suits, sleek and matte black under the corridor's flickering emergency lighting, carried a single shared feed line running between each pair, a slim umbilical none of Fleet's own boarding gear had ever used.
"Shared air," Osei said, arriving at the same read a half breath behind him, his weapon already tracking the nearest umbilical. "They stripped their own suits down for speed, Commander, cut every redundant system that wasn't essential to a fast strike, which means they're running on borrowed time in more ways than one. They can't hold this corridor indefinitely. Whatever Threll's plan actually is, it depends on this being fast."
"Then we make it slow," Taisen said. "Every second we cost them is a second closer to a fight they can't afford to keep fighting. Camaro, hold that bulkhead. Alita, with me, we're going to give Threll a reason to think this corridor costs more than she budgeted for."
The fight that followed ran ugly and close, rounds sparking hard off exposed cable runs, one boarder's shared air line severed clean by a stray shot and both men on that line forced to fall back toward their own pod rather than risk the corridor without it, exactly the cost Osei's read had promised, the sudden hiss of a suit's emergency seal audible even over the gunfire, and for a handful of minutes it looked, to everyone fighting it, like the Arctic's crew might actually hold the junction clean, the fight settling into the grim, breathless rhythm of a defense that was, for the first time tonight, actually working.
Then Threll's voice cut through the channel again, colder now, stripped of every trace of patience it had carried even a minute earlier. "Pod three, breach the aft maintenance shaft. I want a second line into that ship before this one collapses entirely."
"Aft shaft," Camaro said, already moving, her voice sharp with sudden alarm. "That's behind us, Commander, that's the coil bay, that's where the Fold repair rig is still sitting half assembled."