General Tobias Calhoun knew what came next. 

He had escaped facing the Serpent's jaw once, but to run twice against the same opponent would be to invite not only ridicule, but shame. So he drew his battle line here. In the primary hangar lit by foregrip-flashlights and flares that if the power was on would have triggered a torrential rain of fire suppressant foam as though the very factory that produces fire extinguishers went up. 

Shield-Bearers interlocked their shields in long lines, slanted in the hopes that whatever adversary would come pouring in lacked the ability to jump, climb, or fly. Calhoun's gambit was to force the incoming contacts into a killing corridor, and that if any did get into the ship proper they would be confined to this level where stationed defenders would cut them down. 

It would have been a sound plan, if Calhoun were up against a human force. 

He kept his sidearm in a crushing grip, his other hand atop a shield turned on its side that he crouched behind as not to obstruct their firing line. Mounted machine guns clicked, clacked, and slapped as their operators readied up. 

They all watched the blackness outside, waiting for a shape to appear. When it finally did, their first surprise came in that it simply melted into being, like water breaking through a tissue it made itself apparent. Ships of straight lines and sharp edges, easily as big as the largest cargo helicopters that the Blackwatch employed, simply were in their hold. Ramps already down. 

"Don't shoot the vehicles! I have some friends that would love to pick 'em apart!" Calhoun boomed, as though his men's weapons would do much of anything anyway. 

The second surprise that befell them came when the first wave of incoming contact were long arcs of small metal cylinders. 

"Don't! Down! Down!"

His men did as they were bade, and the hangar filled with a discord of sharp bangs like a fireworks stand that fell victim to an arsonist. Bright flashes lit the entirety of the cavernous hold like miniature Suns in seemingly unending series. 

When the explosions stopped, the exchange of gunfire began, the arena bathed in the harsh LED-White of the dropships' floodlights.

Calhoun spotted maybe twenty, only twenty, at absolute most. All of them in the kill-zone. The machine guns started first, tearing into the air like chainsaws as the incoming forces ran to their fortifications. 

Their armor burst in showers of sparks where the bullets hit, leaving little but scuffs and dents at the points of impact. One of the Krazoran soldiers turned to Calhoun and made a motion to his comrades. They got close enough Calhoun could almost see the detail of their grayed-out almost knightly ballistic plate armor, his reflection in the continuous red visor broken only by the hole that the high-velocity round of his sidearm punched into it. 

"Useless!"

He changed targets, squeezing off two more shots with his uncanny speed. One made sparks, and the other missed wide, but the continuous sustained fire of his support gunner drilled a hole in the chest of the humanoid figure that stood easily taller than any average man he had ever encountered. 

On the other side, Krazoran soldiers had flushed his forces out with grenades that left blazing red pools, and blew limb from trunk with weapons nearly as large as the wielders that fired with a reciprocating hiss between trigger pulls. When the grenades would miss, their cannons punched through the shields like they were paper. 

Calhoun stacked up behind a shield after watching his support gunner's arm turn to a splattering of paste, holes more than an inch and a half in diameter burst with inward snarls of metal, the harsh lights dotting the back wall with points of color. 

He popped out and fired off another quick shot at the first target he could see, one of the soldiers that had vaulted over the line on the opposite side. His line had already been broken, and they had taken only how many? Four?

Evenly spaced shots buzzed past his cover, punching deep holes in the back wall. Two Blackwatch soldiers peeked up from behind a munitions crate and emptied the magazines of their rifles into the head of the Krazoran, accomplishing little. Calhoun emerged to deliver the killing blow, but was interrupted by a tug backward.

He hit the floor and lost his hat, pain exploded in the back of his head. He only saw his assailant for an instant before three rapid shots of his sidearm blew out their visor. His hands worked almost on their own. Their body dropped with a heavy crash, and their cannon skidded across the floor to rest against one of the shields.

The tactical side of Calhoun came forward, cutting through the vibrant red haze of combat. He rolled onto his front, into the blood of his support gunner who didn't last very long without a left arm. The rapid chattering of Blackwatch assault weapons fell silent with the measured thunk-hiss of Krazoran cannons. When they were silent, the remaining thirteen Krazorans moved on and into the corridor.

He counted out thirty seconds before getting up to his knees. He took his subordinate's grenades from the bandolier that arced around one shoulder and pocketed them, and then pushed himself up with the five-foot Krazoran weapon.

The weapon operated in a way Calhoun could never hope to understand, appearing to feed heavy shells from a box magazine on the side with a reciprocating hydraulic. The barrel was shrouded in black angled metal, with only the compensator exposed. Fight fire with fire, Calhoun supposed.

The weapon went over the shield first, then the General attached to it. He pulled it up to his shoulder with great effort. Calhoun was a strong man, but this was more gun than any human was meant to handle.

The racket from deeper in the ship resounded through the corridor, and all Calhoun needed to do was follow the bodies. His men, many pulped by the cannons, but others beaten and battered against the close quarters of the walls made an easily apparent trail to the attackers and the flashlights of their fallen weapons served to illuminate the hall of the dead.

Working the Krazoran weapon through the halls was the most difficult part until he came into a larger atrium, decorated mostly with the red and black of dead soldiers--somehow bloodstains took all the gravity away from the propaganda posters. He made a tight turn, nearly tripping over two fallen Krazorans, each missing large portions of armor and laying in a scorch mark nearly the size of a doorway. 

He could see the backs of the remaining eleven, who in either confidence or ignorance failed to watch the entrance. Calhoun knelt and put his eye to the aperture like a complicated red-dot sight atop the cannon. He squeezed the trigger.

The weapon fired with a sound like striking metal, and a hydraulic arm blew back to eject the spent shell before forcing in a fresh one. He kept the trigger squeezed, and managed a few more shots into the crowd before they could answer back, nearly falling over their recently dead in the chaos.

They shouted in their backwards-language, and Calhoun shouted back with steel. 

Once steel returned his way, he pulled one of the grenades free of his bloodstained coat's pocket, struck the timer against his thigh, and threw it down the branching hall toward the remaining Krazorans before diving out of the way. He stacked up against the wall, his heart seeming to drum against the icy metal. Instinct told him to let fly the other two, so he did, hurling one low through the open doorway and the other harder toward the wall. 

There was some surprised hollering, and three explosions like car wrecks tore through the air. The Krazoran soldiers shouted no more. Calhoun sighed and used the captured weapon to help him get up, putting his weight on it to relieve his adrenaline-tired knees. He looked down the hallway at his handiwork, the large scorch marks and shrapnel-shredded wall panels bled white gas at an alarming rate. 

Tore the damn pipes. Bleeding time now. Need to regroup, get rid of those jammers.

He took a deep breath of still air, and started toward the long and winding stairwell to the command deck.

---

"If we wanna' go home we gotta' get these landers off!"

The magnetic boots of the Blackwatch EVA-suit made moving a trudging hassle. Jax had to routinely assist heavy knee-to-chest steps with bursts of the jumpkit. Arna floated next to the ship closest to Jax, inspecting the fuselage with a shoulder-mounted flashlight. 

Jax stretched his back, a few vertebrae popping sickly under the kind of stretch one can only do when under zero gravity. He caught a few glittering shapes around the lithe body of the KNIGHT ERRANT. They appeared to be on track to free their own ship from the bondage of the Disturber net. 

"Hey, we're burnin' time." Jax turned, Arna had gotten one of the armor panels off and was trying to make sense of the rat's nest of wire beneath. 

"Yeah, you don't think I know that? Whoever was in here is shooting up our ship!"

Jax put his hands behind his head and bounced on his knees. There had to be a better way. The lights were on now, the shield was up, the guns had to be working. 

The guns had to be working. 

"Hey Arna! Don't bother with those. Hack somethin' easier!"

He stomped his way over to one of the heavy cannons which sat idle on the surface of the vessel, towering above him on its turreted gimbal. Thankfully enough the Blackwatch idiot-proofing was as evident here as anywhere else, the very clearly marked debug panel glowed a bright teal against the dark hull of the ship. 

"What the hell're you talking about?" Arna yelled in the radio, her voice crackling from the volume. 

"Our guns're working!" 

"Oh holy shit, good thinking!" Arna threw the bundles of wire in her hands out behind her and boosted over to Jax. 

She took up a position at the debug screen, stabbing away with a rigid index finger like a sewing machine. Jax looked again to the Blackwatch, the shining green star near the engines was extinguished, leaving only the one near the bow keeping the Blackwatch destroyer still. 

"Arna!"

"Jesus calm down!"

The long artillery style cannon began to rotate on its gimbal, turning achingly slowly, casting a sundial-shadow from the light of the Disturber. It took nearly forty seconds for the cannon to align properly.

With a flourish and and mighty poke, Arna activated the weapon. It recoiled in its track with a flash that left an afterimage in Jax' vision. The noise, if you could call it that, was the simple strike of a shock wave that barreled through their bodies like a linebacker. 

The Krazoran drop ship seemed to crumple as the shell struck it before erupting into bright pink and showering them with debris. Arna repeated the cycle again for the second. 

The scatter of debris that struck them tore a hole in the liner of Jax' suit, and his heart froze. The suit clenched on his chest around the hole, immediately re-establishing the seal around the exposed wound which tingled with irritation like a sunburn. 

"Fuck! Great fucking plan Arna!"

If she were any closer she'd have broken his helmet at that comment. They both knew who's plan this was. 

Jax clamped a hand over the wound, less to staunch the blood, and more to contain it against whatever amount of free flying radiation he could. They deactivated the magnets in the boots and jumped free of the Prototype, aligning to enter the airlock and the fight that awaited beyond. 

Jax looked over his shoulder as the entrance to the ship cycled, and watched the lights on the KNIGHT ERRANT come back on.