If Master Chief Buckmaster had been asked to describe it later, he would have said “it was like pouring fire out of a bucket into the flight deck.”

Nobody saw the first attacking ship coming. Everyone saw the second and third. They rammed through the spaceports forward and aft on Flight One. The explosions shattered everything solid and set off most of the missile ordinance mounted on the row of paladin mechs. Nearly half of Second Airborne went up in the secondary explosions. Fire control systems went into operation instantly, using powerful sealed ventilation systems to decompress the deck and deprive the fire of oxygen. All the human personnel were forced off the deck and could only watch from their emergency chambers as plasma fires and magnesium ignitions continued to burn from one end of the flight bay to the other.

A security contingent was fast at work donning tac suits and powerarmor to defend the now wide open egress points on Flight One fore and aft against boarding parties. The heavy suits would give them both anti-gravity tools, man-portable magnetic shielding and breathable air, so they would be able to function in the suddenly hostile, airless and radiation filled flight deck.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Flight One, Argent’s firefighting detail was hard at work battling a spider-like magnesium eruption that was threatening the first of Flight One’s fuel stations. They knew the unstable chemicals and isotopes stored in the temperature and pressure-controlled station would react with both violence and unpredictability if the white-hot energy source managed to pierce the protective chamber around the station’s inner mechanisms.

Suddenly, fast-moving anti-personnel batteries emerged from the ceiling and pivoted snake-quick to bear on the aft spaceport. A boarding party dressed in all-black tac suits was deploying from a small assault ship. A set of three batteries automatically opened fire, rapidly pouring lightning-white lances of super-hot plasma energy at the enemy attackers. A wire-guided missile weapon of some kind tore across the enormous open space and impacted the ceiling near one of the destruction-spraying batteries. The explosion shattered metal and composites, causing huge pieces of wreckage to fall five stories to the burning surface below.

Buckmaster had seen enough. Fortunately he had planned ahead and was already latching down the last few fasteners on his powerarmor. He lowered the polarizing blast shield across his faceplate and hefted the TK40 he kept hidden for special occasions.

After emerging from the life support chamber, he stalked across the deck, making his way past the fires and wreckage to a point where he could bring his weapon to bear on the enemy landing zone at the aft end of his flight deck.

The intruders either couldn’t see him or weren’t expecting to be attacked from such short range, which gave the Master Chief one good wide-open shot at their ship. He charged up a massive unstable energy bolt and launched it at the attacking ship. An instant before impact, he detonated it with a plasma lance from the same weapon. Enemy attackers were engulfed in the orange-white fireball and were thrown in all directions. The resulting concussive explosion left a fifteen-foot wide scorch mark on the deck and blew the assault ship off its landing gear. The vessel drifted through the air screen and emerged from Flight One into open space. A moment later it was speared by an energy bolt from one of Argent’s port point defense batteries and exploded into hundreds of burning fragments.

The shockwave from the assault ship explosion vaporized what was left of the boarding party.