User:SheWhoKnows/The Steal

Arrival
The emptiness of space is often depicted as being a loud, noisy place. Maybe because of popular culture, depicting large space battles against alien beings with brilliant explosions and the sounds of cheering and warfare.

In reality, it is completely empty. Without an atmosphere to transfer sound-waves, someone in space would be incapable of hearing anything. That person would also be killed relatively quickly, but that is beside the point.

For Derrick, this could either be a cakewalk or a death trap. Attempting to illegal board a military vessel could result in two things; An auto-cannon blasting your shuttle to pieces, or the shuttle itself being drawn into the gravity, unable to escape, and thus collide and be destroyed. Space wasn't a place Derrick enjoyed, it made him nervous and frustrated. However his demeanor, at least on the outside, showed complete calm. The other mercenaries weren't so calm, instead they were either sitting around cleaning their equipment, loading bullets noisily into their magazines and slapping them roughly into their rifles and sidearms with a click, or doing as Derrick did. Sit still and listen to the hum of the engines, and try to ignore the biting cold penetrating into their bones.

This shuttle wasn't the newest space-faring vessel. The only thing keeping the temperature hospitable was the heat from the engines being funneled into a colder ventilation system and redistributed into the back cabin to keep the cargo, in this case human beings, from freezing solid. Derrick was covered from neck to ankles in combat armor, a combination of a regular Marine combat uniform, inter-strewn with harder ceramic pads to stop bullets, all with a nice shroud of Kevlar. Most of the things he had with him were stolen over his long career; The M90 CAWS that rested between his shaking legs had served him since before the war with the Covenant, and was beginning to show its age with the tiny growing rust spots along its metallic sheen. The armor itself was either stolen and pieced together from various armories, or yanked off of corpses from those he had killed over the years.

Still, compared to the other slop mercenaries sitting around him in the double-rowed shuttle, he was wearing a uniform unique to the Unseen Hands. One they had adopted from him, their hero. These other men either wore poor civilian mash-ups of Kevlar and thick clothing, or were in old military uniforms, moth-eaten and dust-covered from long bouts of sitting folded inside of duffel bags and half-empty drawers.

A thud vibrated the shuttle roughly, and for a moment Derrick's fear got the better of him, and he believed the shuttle had been hit with an auto-cannon round. On the contrary, they had docked. The vacuum sealed door at the far end of the cabin began to unlock, and Derrick ensured that the man next to him stood in front, as a human shield. Having purposely sat halfway down the row, any gunfire that would enter the shuttle would be absorbed by other men first, and give Derrick time to either fire back or flee into another cabin. But as the door opened, the hiss of air broke into silence, and the first mercenary stepped into the ship, looking down either side of the half-lit hallways.

The ship they were attempting to steal was set to be decommissioned, and thus had a ghost crew situated mainly around the engines and the bridge of the old frigate. Thus, chances of running into any of the crew was slim. All the same, danger was ever present. The briefing they had been given back on Earth had stated that most of the systems were outdated, and faulty. Touch the wrong panel on the right door, and you could be electrocuted. The section they landed in appeared to be locked down entirely, and the other mercenaries didn't seem to notice the smaller details of blinking panels and such that Derrick had recognized during his bitter years as a Marine. As they rounded the first lengthy corridor and began to walk down another, weapons raised, they reached their first obstacle. A door flashing red, obviously sealed with a vacuum-lock and probably several other devices. The mercenaries on-point didn't seem to know what to do, so Derrick slid the zipped open on his chest pouch and pulled out a roll of dough-like explosives, lining the door frame with it. He backed up, and so did they, and then pulled out a match taped to the tube and lit part of the explosive substance. Backing off around the hallway, the sounds of the small explosion echoed throughout the ship, and they bull-rushed the door, which led into a large hangar bay, completely empty besides a few construction vehicles in the far corners.

Luckily for them, they found an elevator, one which was active. Derrick took point and thumbed the keypad, taking them to the operational decks. The working lights would lead them directly to the bridge.