Earth had come a long way since the old days fighting in war-torn hellholes of sand and mud. Our battles had long since shifted away from being entirely planetary and often involved ship to ship combat, boarding actions and fighting in different star systems. For these arduous tasks, we sent in the SOLCOM Marines. A hundred and twelve years ago, about two years after a string of terrorist attacks crippled Martian infrastructure, the politicians in charge decided to do something to save their sorry careers instead of bickering about it as they usually might. Thus, the Martian-Terran Defense Treaty of 2107 was born. Originally developed to provide a more unified front against criminals and outright terrorism, it quickly evolved from a defense treaty into a new government entity, the Solar Commonwealth, or SOLCOM for short.

  Since those days nearly a century prior, I’d been born, enlisted into the SOLCOM Marines, gone through a slew of training schools and had a mostly successful career spanning almost seven years. A few months ago I got orders to report to a new posting and I soon ended up on what was the ninth ship of my career; A heavy cruiser by the name of The Spear of Midnight. The ship was one-point-four kilometres long and about four hundred metres wide, wrapped in layers of armour and sophisticated technology. I wasn't an expert on larger ships, my specialty was more dropships, shuttles and fighters, but to me the Spear was an impressive vessel.

  Contrary to my expectations, being seventy light-years from Earth beyond the edge of settled space hadn't resulted in anything going wrong, not yet, anyway. Our stated purpose was to patrol and try to find anything out of the ordinary, mostly pirates, smugglers and other space travelers of ill repute. Just because we had nice clean borders didn't mean that criminals would base themselves within them.

  The most exciting thing that had happened in weeks was the box kickers in charge of supplies losing a dozen crates of rations and a few replacement parts for an IFV. We hadn’t seen a single pirate, smuggler, or had any serious problems with our newly built ship. Currently, we were between star systems taking time to recharge our jump drive before the hop in-system. The place was as quiet as a grave, but wrapped so deeply in sleep I didn’t notice, or care.

  One moment there was silence, the next, the abrupt shrieking of an alarm ripped away my comfort as alert lighting painted the corridors from end to end with an unsettling red hue.

  “Code nine, code nine! This is not a drill! I repeat, not a drill! Intruders in section delta seven, deck three!” A woman’s voice boomed over the ship’s speakers.

  The unmistakable sound of the alarm knifed its way to the marrow of my bones, filling my body with tension and adrenaline. While the voice overhead yelling an alert might not have roused me from my sleep completely, the alarm certainly did.

  The three others in my shared quarters awoke moments later, throwing themselves into action. In the dim emergency lighting the grey metal bulkheads turned red. My eyes raked around the room and settled on one of my three teammates. My second in command, a Lance Corporal Victoria Larsen, grimaced at the loud noise that blanketed the room as she opened her eyes.

  “You alright, Vic?” I asked.

  Larsen wordlessly kicked off the covers and rolled from her bunk. She was one of the few women in our entire platoon, but that didn't mean anyone should mistake her for being soft. She began stripping almost immediately, but the rest of us were no different. It might seem strange that we wanted to be naked when combat could be right around the corner, but we wouldn't stay that way for long.

  "I'm fine, Edward. Someone turn that off.” Larsen said, grimacing up at the overhead speaker. “If I lost rack time because of some overeager butter bar on the Bridge calling a false alarm I’m going to slap the shit out of them.”

  I doubted she meant that, but I'd wanted to slap an officer for being a dumbass more than once, so I knew the feeling.

  Of the other three on my team Victoria Larsen was the only person I’d known before my current posting, Chen and Carver being new additions when I boarded the Spear to take command of the fireteam. Larsen had become my right hand the day I'd met her on my last shipboard posting and I felt blessed that I had. She often seemed to know what I was thinking almost before I did.

  The first of my team to pull up a situation report was Daniel Carver, our resident technology wizard and one of two riflemen in our team. While a genius without a doubt, most that worked with him would rather demote him to Chief Latrine Digger than ever work with him again. Swiping through menus and pulling information from his implanted computer, I could see the moment that Carver’s curiosity tipped over a knife’s edge and became full-blown anxiety.

  “The good news is that the ship itself is okay, if you count this mess of an operating system as ‘okay’.” He said to me, talking fast and furious as he worked his implants like a pro. His eyes glowed softly as they fed him information. I looked away, squaring myself away as quick as I could.

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  “And the bad news?" I asked. "And don't give me your usual crap, stick to the facts.” I listened intently while pulling my armour's hard case out from underneath my rack.

  “I’m getting reports of enemy contact all throughout the ship." Carver frowned, almost looking like he was going to be sick. "A lot of enemy contact.”

  I didn’t blame him. Fighting inside a ship wasn’t unheard of, but it was a pain compared to a more traditional land-based battle which was something of an art form that had been refined over hundreds of years. We were still relatively new at fighting inside ships in space, but we'd quickly learned it sucked when you couldn't get fire support, blow through walls or use explosives freely.

  “Shit. This is no drill, then. Expedite, I want to be out the door in two minutes.” I ordered. "And how many is 'a lot'? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?"

  "Tacmap says estimated thirty-four plus hostiles across the ship, but the count keeps fluctuating." Carver shrugged as he began suiting up.

  I took a proper look at my armour case then, fingers no longer quite on autopilot and operating on muscle memory alone. The case was worn from use, but still serviceable. I wrenched the final locking mechanism open and was greeted with the familiar contoured metal of my powered combat armour. I quickly reached in and pulled my armour upright.

  Even unsealed, the crimson metal of the sleek but solidly built suit seemed to hold a particularly vicious shine to it, as though it knew it was going into combat again and relished the opportunity. That made one of us. Putting my feet through into the open cavity on the armour's upper 'back' I twisted and pulled myself into the suit through the opening. I shifted slightly, making sure everything fit snugly. I felt the cool sensation of the armour’s inner skin as it pressed against me as I shifted inside it slightly. The inner skin was designed to absorb blunt force trauma and insulate the wearer against the environment but it was always cold before the suit had a chance to warm up.

  I commanded the back panel of my armour to close and lock. I bent down and retrieved my helmet from my gear case before placing it on my head and sealing myself in. I reveled in the satisfying click as the last piece of armour joined with the others. A long, long moment of silence enveloped me as the outside world failed to penetrate the mass of metal and composite materials encasing me.

  After a few moments, a small console projected itself onto my vision and began scrolling at lightning speed. I watched the familiar code sequence of my implants as they rebooted and synced with my armour. Soon my vision was tinged green with enhanced low-light vision and the uneven light in the room became bright and uniform. I found my hearing restored too as the suit filtered external audio and fed it into my brain.

  The third member of my fireteam was a mountain of a man that went by the name of Kwan Chen. Korean, but with impeccable English, people often underestimated his intelligence, focusing only on his physical stature. Chen rolled his eyes at the alert, snickering at the overhead speaker in our quarters as it prattled on about contacting our direct superior to get more info on the situation and mount a defense. I could understand his amusement. If anyone needed to be told that then they shouldn't have passed basic, let alone been assigned to a ship of the line.

  “What do they think this is, a network outage? Navy Pukes probably thought we were just sitting around sipping tea and biscuits when the alert sounded.” Chen said wryly, his voice coming through my implants now, rather than through my ears.

  "It's probably an automated message, ignore it. Carver, is the ship damaged?" I asked.

  I ran a simple low-level diagnostic on my armour and checked over my team's vitals and armour readout, waiting with restrained impatience for it to finish.

  Carver's voice was clearly confused as he read something from his ocular implants. “No hull breaches, intruders on multiple decks and we have limited control of primary and secondary ship systems.”

  I considered that. “Could be worse. There’s no one out here except the Marines and Navy. I don’t know who’d pick a fight with us in the middle of nowhere but at least they haven't broken anything important yet.” I frowned beneath my helmet, bewildered as to who could be behind this attack.

  My armour's processor spit back a satisfactory answer to my diagnostic a moment later. My suit had full integrity, no red or amber status reports, everything was green and good to go. I'd taken the liberty of doing the same for my three teammates remotely, too. Their armour gave me the same answer which wasn't too surprising to me. Our suits were a lot tougher than our rifles. They had to be to endure hard vacuum and the often rigorous demands of infantry combat.

  “Think about that. Nobody’s here, except us.” Larsen replied to my earlier statement. An uncomfortable silence was left behind by her suit sealing and implants rebooting, further communications with her cut off for a few moments.

  There was an implication behind Larsen's idea that hung in the air. It tasted wrong. Nobody wanted to entertain the idea of a traitor hidden among our ranks, or a spy. Either option was distasteful, to say the least. It wasn't out of the question, either. Not everyone was happy with the way SOLCOM ran things. I was an infantry grunt through and through. I shot traitors and I abhorred spies, well, I liked to think I did. In reality I detained them and handed them over to MP's.

  "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" I asked her, grimacing.

  "It's a possibility." She said, defensively.

  “I don’t like this.” Carver interrupted us, sounding almost as nervous as I felt. “Ship’s comms are too quiet, no Bridge crew, nothing from Engineering either.”

  I wondered, who the hell was picking a fight with us? Were there three companies waiting to ruin our day or only a couple of squads? They couldn't have taken the whole ship, could they? I had a mountain of questions.