Free COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 by A.D. Bloom

beyond an involuntary grunt over local comms. The impact with the hull came through her machine limbs and into her suit and shook the air around her mic so they all heard her land.
    Her red exosuit clung motionless against the darkened hull for a full second after that, but by the time Rampone hit the jets again to slow the ‘dragger to under a meter per second, Horcheese had found the exterior interface panel, punched in access codes, and begun to open the bay doors on the power from her own suit.
    Rampone piloted them into the tiny, pitch-black bay, flying the hulking knuckledragger between a pair of sleek longboats while the quintuple circles of the mech’s five, forward floodlights grew smaller and smaller on the interior bulkhead. Rampone lifted the knuckledragger’s arms and spread its three-fingered claws. "Brace for contact," said Rampone, just before he puffed the gas one last, little burst and set down so soft he didn’t even scratch the finish on the bulkhead.
    " Tipperary has a crew of a dozen reactor weenies and three bridge officers," the Chief said. "I sent Raleigh and the other team to the bridge. Rampone, I want you to take the 'dragger and ride Posjic around to survey the exterior. Wambach, Meester, Parker, you’re going with me to reactor control."  
    On the other side of the disabled breaching ship’s airlocks there was no atmospheric pressure, but the darkness was thick like a fog. The beams from his suit lights seemed to dim more than they should after a just a few meters. He didn’t see any damage as he pushed off the bulkhead and followed Horcheese’s floating feet down the spartan steel corridor, but once the Chief wrestled the hatch open that led to the ship’s main passageway, all he saw was charred metal in his helmet lights. Parker panned up and down the long, 15-meter tube. The up and down lifts had been bent off-track and the surface of the metal had been flash-melted. In places, laminate coatings had bubbled up in the heat and now, it looked more like the interior of a cave than a ship. Chief Horcheese pushed off the hatch and flew down into the blackness.
    " What the hell did this?" he said as he followed. "It looks like a warhead breached the inner hull and flooded the decks with plasma."  
    Wambach said, "The reactor vented into the ship before they ejected it."  
    "They had some kind of emergency shunts didn't they?"
    " Yeah, well," Horcheese said. "Looks like they weren’t enough."  
    They passed a few hatches, blown out and charred on both sides, but Horcheese kept going down until she reached the bottom of the shaft, almost halfway down the axle section of the hull. "This should be reactor control," she said as she paused at the blown out hatches there before entering.
    Parker said, "The reactor engineers were in there ?"  
    " Don’t worry, cherry." Wambach grinned in his helmet lights as he passed her inverted. "Bodies prolly burned up."  
    The inside of the pentagonal control section had been flash-melted like the tube outside. It had a command chair, raised, like on a ship’s bridge. The consoles set around it had been turned to a blackened amalgam of metal and synthetics. Where the terminals set in the walls had burned, they left niches half-filled with amorphous remains.
    The hole melted through the deck where the number one reactor had vented itself was less than a meter wide. Tig shined his suit lights down there and saw through two decks of shielding. After that, what he saw must have been the inside of a fusion chamber itself because the beams from his suit almost disappeared in there.
    " Take a look at this," Wambach said. Tig turned to his left and looked where Wambach’s lights shined, up the bulkhead, high up over the hatch they’d come in.  
    They looked like the shadows of people cast high up on the scorched steel walls.
    " The hell is that?" Parker said as she shined her helmet lights on them.  
    " Those are the reactor tenders who were in here.