glimmering, spinning, horrific debris.
Just as the Marine reached the doorway leading into Mark, the whole walkway before him erupted. He disappeared. The glass walls sang as they were ripped apart, and still trying to shout for her mother, Lucy-Anne was grabbed by an invisible hand and tugged toward infinity.
6
GERARD MARSHALL
Charon Station, Sol System
July 2692 AD
General Paul Bassett, commanding officer of the entirety of the Colonial Marine forces, including all Spaceborne, Terrestrial, and Excursionist units, was a prick.
Gerard Marshall had long thought this, since before they’d met face to face, and now that he was on Charon Station—the General’s command center—they had met many, many times, giving Marshall cause to consider and revise his initial assessment.
The General was a
complete
prick.
Like now. Being summoned to his rooms by a combat droid, instead of the General finding time to call him personally.
General Paul Bassett requests your attendance in his command suite at eleven hundred hours for a
… A quick holo message from the great man himself would have sufficed. It wasn’t as if they had different agendas. There should have been agreement between them, a common ground. Instead, this clash of personalities that seemed to grow every time they met.
Marshall tried to analyze it dispassionately, and he’d come to the conclusion that they simply rubbed each other up the wrong way. That wouldn’t have been a problem if they were just two plebs or grunts bickering their way through the day, but when one of them was a general in charge of quarter of a million troops, and the other was one of the Thirteen, the Weyland-Yutani company board, there was so much more at stake.
Neither of them could let their egos get in the way of what they were here for, and Marshall feared that being summoned to the command suite could only mean more bad news.
Charon Station was huge. Orbiting the Sol System every thirty years at almost four billion miles from the sun, it had been the Colonial Marines’ main command base for almost sixty years. In that time it had been expanded and upgraded to such an extent that it was now more of a complex of interconnected space stations than one single structure. Seven individual vessels housed barracks, hangars, storage holds, communications, offices, and other essential needs that went to serve as a permanent home for more than seven hundred staff, as well as a rotating garrison of a thousand Marines along with their weapons, equipment, and craft.
Almost forty years earlier, a whole section of Charon Station had been destroyed by an asteroid impact, with the loss of four hundred lives. It was a huge blow to the Colonial Marines, and it came at a time when skirmishes had broken out across the Human Sphere between the Colonials and several rogue military units seeking independence. When the catastrophe occurred, doubt and paranoia had bitten in hard, but all evidence had always pointed to a freak accident. Since then, sweeper ships were stationed several thousand miles ahead of the station’s orbit, destroying any space debris that was considered even a vague threat to the station.
Gerard Marshall had been here for more than twelve weeks, and he hated the place. He hated being anywhere that involved breathing conditioned, artificially manufactured air, walking with the aid of faux gravity, eating food processed from bacteria and bugs and insects, and where a slight accident could result in him being sucked into the cold vacuum of a painful demise. As one of the Thirteen, he knew far too much about what could go wrong in space. He had covered up enough disasters, after all. He’d even initiated a few.
It was starting to look like he’d be here for a long time more. He hated the idea of that, but he could also not contain his excitement. As chief officer of the Thirteen, covering alien technology and weaponry acquisition, and director of ArmoTech, recent events meant that
Just as the Marine reached the doorway leading into Mark, the whole walkway before him erupted. He disappeared. The glass walls sang as they were ripped apart, and still trying to shout for her mother, Lucy-Anne was grabbed by an invisible hand and tugged toward infinity.
6
GERARD MARSHALL
Charon Station, Sol System
July 2692 AD
General Paul Bassett, commanding officer of the entirety of the Colonial Marine forces, including all Spaceborne, Terrestrial, and Excursionist units, was a prick.
Gerard Marshall had long thought this, since before they’d met face to face, and now that he was on Charon Station—the General’s command center—they had met many, many times, giving Marshall cause to consider and revise his initial assessment.
The General was a
complete
prick.
Like now. Being summoned to his rooms by a combat droid, instead of the General finding time to call him personally.
General Paul Bassett requests your attendance in his command suite at eleven hundred hours for a
… A quick holo message from the great man himself would have sufficed. It wasn’t as if they had different agendas. There should have been agreement between them, a common ground. Instead, this clash of personalities that seemed to grow every time they met.
Marshall tried to analyze it dispassionately, and he’d come to the conclusion that they simply rubbed each other up the wrong way. That wouldn’t have been a problem if they were just two plebs or grunts bickering their way through the day, but when one of them was a general in charge of quarter of a million troops, and the other was one of the Thirteen, the Weyland-Yutani company board, there was so much more at stake.
Neither of them could let their egos get in the way of what they were here for, and Marshall feared that being summoned to the command suite could only mean more bad news.
Charon Station was huge. Orbiting the Sol System every thirty years at almost four billion miles from the sun, it had been the Colonial Marines’ main command base for almost sixty years. In that time it had been expanded and upgraded to such an extent that it was now more of a complex of interconnected space stations than one single structure. Seven individual vessels housed barracks, hangars, storage holds, communications, offices, and other essential needs that went to serve as a permanent home for more than seven hundred staff, as well as a rotating garrison of a thousand Marines along with their weapons, equipment, and craft.
Almost forty years earlier, a whole section of Charon Station had been destroyed by an asteroid impact, with the loss of four hundred lives. It was a huge blow to the Colonial Marines, and it came at a time when skirmishes had broken out across the Human Sphere between the Colonials and several rogue military units seeking independence. When the catastrophe occurred, doubt and paranoia had bitten in hard, but all evidence had always pointed to a freak accident. Since then, sweeper ships were stationed several thousand miles ahead of the station’s orbit, destroying any space debris that was considered even a vague threat to the station.
Gerard Marshall had been here for more than twelve weeks, and he hated the place. He hated being anywhere that involved breathing conditioned, artificially manufactured air, walking with the aid of faux gravity, eating food processed from bacteria and bugs and insects, and where a slight accident could result in him being sucked into the cold vacuum of a painful demise. As one of the Thirteen, he knew far too much about what could go wrong in space. He had covered up enough disasters, after all. He’d even initiated a few.
It was starting to look like he’d be here for a long time more. He hated the idea of that, but he could also not contain his excitement. As chief officer of the Thirteen, covering alien technology and weaponry acquisition, and director of ArmoTech, recent events meant that
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