Junebug glanced around the strange room, regardless of its original intent it certainly served their purposes well. The walls provided perfect cover and the profusion of them meant that grenade blasts and other explosives would be of limited use. Whatever this vessel was, it was certainly no Terran treasury ship, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t valuable. Alien technology, particularly alien technology this divergent from the galactic norm, was valuable, but there were only a few buyers for it and you had to be careful how you doled it out, lest a Terran warship arrive and seize the whole thing.

It did mean the Canek was going to be very disappointed if and when he managed to fight his way back here. He certainly wasn’t going to get the quick cash turn around he had wanted to start his mercenary company which meant getting the Highlander fixed was still going to be a problem. A problem if they lived anyway.

“Well I can imagine better circumstances to visit an alien sex dungeon,” Sayeed observed wryly. Neil and Saxon both snorted laughter and even Taya smiled.

“We aren’t going to call it that are we?” she asked incredulously. Junebug checked the load on her stolen weapon. It held nearly a hundred rounds, probably originally intended as a squad support weapon. Raising it to her shoulder she peered through its iron sights tracking the length of the barrel with her eyes. By now the sound of firing from outside had died away, meaning that either Canek had been destroyed or his men had pulled back out of effective range. Neither of those boded very well for the four trapped mercenaries. Momentarily Junebug was back on the freighter where she had earned her nom-de-guerre, running through the hallways with an empty rifle and a bloody bayonet, hacking into the neck of a federal conscript with a powered cutting bar.

“Junebug?” Taya asked in a tone which suggested it wasn’t the first time. She blinked her eyes, skin prickling as she shook her head to clear it.

“Right,” she interjected, giving herself a moment to gather her thoughts, “Here is what we will do.”

It took the enemy nearly an hour to find them. Neil and Saxon had time to do a little scavenging, but beyond tools that had been used to partially disassemble sections of the ship there was little enough to find. They were just dragging in a box of welding rods when  yells and gunfire announced that they had finally been spotted. Saxon let out a roar and ripped off a burst with his integrated cannon before the man and the Hex dived through the door and slammed it shut. Without power there was no way to lock it. Sayeeda lay prone on a ledge halfway to the back of the room. There was enough of a lip to allow her to rest her stolen weapon without use of a bipod.

Neil and Saxon just managed to take cover behind the nearest wall when the door jerked open and a pair of grenades sailed in. They detonated with a  shocking actinic that was instantly stunning to anyone in the area, sending sparks and electrical discharge crawling over all the nearby surfaces. Whether Neil or Saxon were effected Sayeeda couldn’t say, but her combat helmet blanked the discharge easily, throwing up a wire frame approximation of what was going on, synthesized from the thermal and millimetric radar displays. Three figures rushed through the door, guns chattering as they sought to overwhelm the defenders. Sayeeda dropped all three with careful bursts. To her annoyance the weapons feed was too fast to allow for single shots but by careful trigger control she kept each burst to two or three rounds. The wireframe’s slumped to the ground as more figures fired from the cover of the door, spraying the interior of the room with bullets. Sayeeda fired twice more and then ducked back as the gunmen at the door tracked towards her muzzle flash. Neil and Saxon popped up and cut down another pair of gunmen who had been wrong footed by the move. Then Saxon leaped the wall, seized the door and slammed it shut in the faces of the shocked survivors. Taya jumped forward with a heavy industrial rivet gun and stapled the door to the wall, freezing it in place, at least until the attackers could organize a real breaching team.

There was a great deal of pounding on the door and some gunfire, but they weren’t able to penetrated it. Junebug slipped down and examined the weapons and gear that the attackers had carried, gratefully accepting a second rifle and a bandolier of ammunition to supplement her own depleted gun. Taya looked vaugely sick as Junebug and Neil quickly and effectively stripped the dead. Hearing a crackle Junebug pulled an earpiece from the ear of one of the corpses.

“... get in there and kill the bastards!” someone was shouting over the radio. Junebug’s helmet AI matched the frequency for her automatically.

“This is Captin Cyckali commanding the intrusion team in this vessel,” she declared formerly.

“We’d like to talk terms with whomever is in charge of this shit show.”