Fuck. Give me a second.
Stagger over there and get that sniper rifle.
You walk over to the rocks. It turns out that your bullet hit the sniper right in the throat, and the thirty-meter tumble afterward did nothing to make him prettier.
The rifle is a Japanese model, its casing made of sleek-looking white plastic. The scope is integrated into the casing, and therefore wasn't broken or uncalibrated by the fall. However, it uses a different caliber of ammo from the Izhmash. You manage to find two more mags of ten bullets in the hapless sniper's pockets in addition to the eight already in.
You grab a rifle from one of the footmen. It's made by the same Japanese company, but it uses the same ammo as your Saigons.
((You have a bullet in your rib, but McGaw sealed the resultant hole with medical foam, so you're not bleeding. Besides, you're hopped up on combat stim, so you're mostly functional.))
Lift the battlesuit and put it in the hover then climb in, sit behind the prisoner. If he wakes up or tries to cause trouble break his arms. Spend the journey back designing a prosthetic eye in my head.
" Sooo, who else got injured? "
You put the suit into the hover's storage compartment: the helmet is pretty borked, but the front plate with the cameras can be flipped up to look at stuff directly.
Then you get into the back seat. You contemplate putting the prisoner in your lap for a second, but then decide against it and put him or her into the seat in front of you. Should be easy to give a few taps on the shoulders, should you desire to.
As for the eye, you have several designs in mind. Usually, the biggest problem with mounting a single optic prosthesis is binocular vision: it's pretty hard to get it to synchronize properly with the remaining eye. Maybe remove the other one too..? Will have to ask. Whatever.
Action: Back home! Collect anything useful we can carry and don't want to leave behid
The party gets into the hovers - McGaw and Williams into the jet, shoving the corpses out into the snow, and Chester, Will, Sean and the prisoner into your original one.
The jethover is fast, you have to give it that. It's also much less maneuverable, and Kathryn has a hard time matching speeds with the first hover. After some frustrating minutes, she decides to just move on to base and let the others catch up.
When she gets out, Al-Radi is already there, accompanied by an increasingly anxious-looking Franz.
"Doctor? What happened? And whose is this machine? Were you attacked?"Meanwhile in the first hover...The prisoner stirs slightly, then opens their (I'm going to stick with this pronoun) eyes.
"Where..." They assess their situation rather quickly, judging by the instant tension in their posture. Will raises his hands to strike, and the prisoner becomes very still, moving only their eyes.
"I need help, keep these bugs off of me!"
Fire a shot or two backwards to the bugs while keeping my run forward.
You fire a few shots at the bugs. It's not very effective: they're only about as large as a human palm, so you'd run out of bullets much faster than you'd run out of bugs. Another fact is that you're definitely faster than the individual bug: it's just that they keep coming from somewhere.
[3]The fire behind doesn't seem to be spreading, however, it keeps burning.
[tgh:5] You grit your teeth, willing the heat to go away. The whole situation is making you inexplicably angry.
Suddenly, a pistol bullet whistles by you.
((The rest of your situation is in Aseaheru's update))
Keep calling, keep walking to base.
Crunching noises, then Matveenko's voice:
"...Owen? The *static* is going *static* Lost contact with the *static* Owen! Can *static* hear me?" It becomes illegible at this point.
You hear Moshe crashing through the underbrush to the left of you. To the front, a person suddenly leaps onto the ice and opens fire with a pistol, grazing your leg lightly. You can hear him singing sadly to himself,
"...who will break and who will bend..."The shore to the right of you is too steep to climb. Your SMG is holstered on your back.
Author
Topic: Trailblazers in a World of Winter - Chester crashes the party. (Read 58722 times)