Khate"Right! Off we go!"
Lead the way to Varkonius' ship!
Khate took the lead enthusiastically, boldly striding forward in the wrong direction before Aubrey politely corrected her course- not that it really mattered to Khate. She certainly wanted to get paid, and there was the thrill of the challenge for completing an assignment, but she was a girl who appreciated the journey as much as the destination. In this case, the journey was bound to be pretty similarly populated with guns and goons no matter which way they went.
It was part of the job, and the main reason why she could draw a steady stipend from DNR with the footage she sent in. Even if she was technically a 'part-time' agent these days, people loved those little bonus-features sections they packed onto the public releases of DNR seasons, and Khate was probably there for a good five minutes a year. Considering how many agents there were, Khate held that has a point of particular pride, in f-
Khate's ears perked up inside the suit as she smelled something ahead. The olfactory system on her mech (a feature rarely seen on the combat suits of other species) was filtering in a distinct aroma of foreign blood- i.e, none of the blood smells that were to be expected from bodies she'd already encountered. Khate signaled Scarlet and Aubrey to keep their eyes open and dropped a little lower, training her weapons just around the curve of the docking corridor. Arriving late to the party was a blessing and a curse. On the bad side, meant that it was harder to beat every other group to the punch, and there was rarely a chance to get that perfect standoff shot that captured the crystal moment
before imminent violence. Of course, it did mean there was a chance for neato suspenseful moments where she got to slowly creep up on scenes of carnage and create excitement and tension for the battles to come.
Judging by how much blood she was smelling, this was probably going to be one of those tension building moments.
Finally getting a visual on umbilical airlock to cradle eight didn't disappoint. The door was open, and a large scarlet stain was still spreading out from opening. A ridiculously impressively sized scarlet stain. Khate had shot a lot of people, and she'd seen more than her fair share of people get gruesomely eviscerated by spinning sawblades, but she'd seldom seen a puddle like that. Really, not since the challenge round where all the contestants had been dosed with anti-coagulants and anti-platelet drugs before running the maze of ten-thousand chainsaws.
Khate approached cautiously, looking down the length umbilical to airlock attached to Varkonius' ship. The door at that end was also open, but it was hard to focus on that when there when literally every inch of the umbilical floor was covered in blood. Four greyish bodies, two claws, a cane, and a crow, were stacked neatly just inside. Dozens of small perforations marked their exposed flesh like needle wounds, each surrounded be a small bruise. One and all the were withered, the lips of the canes and claws shriveled back to reveal bone white gums, and the eyes of the crow were so sunken they'd almost disappeared into her head.
Khate was not one to be unnerved, but it still seemed a bit excessive to have one mysterious entity that made people explode, and one mysterious entity that withered them to husks.
Scarlet"Yeah. Death machine takes point, I'll be right behind you, she said with a gesture at Khate and the mentioned walker. "I'd be ready for exploding things."[/glow] She mentally tried to rehearse the few hundred ways that this could go wrong, dismissing the ones that would result in their immediate violent death as preparation would be pointless; it was hard to come up with a countermeasure to a charge blowing a hole in the hull and venting them out into the cold blackness of space, for example; though she hoped Aubrey could help with problems of that nature before they became quite so urgent.
Perhaps due to stress, or perhaps due more to natural habit than she wanted to admit, Scarlet spent most of the walk around the rim muttering to herself about all the dark little ways things could go wrong. It wasn't the most positive thing to do, but nobody would accuse Scarlet of having a glowing personality unless they were making a joke about her flamers- and then they'd only do it once.
Once standing outside their destination, it was even harder to keep the endless stream of morbid theories from spilling out into the world. The corridor filled with blood proceeded by the four exsanguinated bodies felt like a cosmic warning- the kind that any sane person would respond to by walking, or perhaps running, in the opposite direction with all speed. Not that that was really an option. If the Star wasn't in Varkonius' room, then it had to be here. Or he was lugging the damn thing around personally, in which case not a bit of this would matter.
Still with her rifle pointed down the blood filled umbilical, Scarlet looked over the bodies. She'd seen her fair share, and while their complete lack of blood was distinctly odd, it did not appear to be what had actually killed them. There was a thumb sized burned hole in the Neocrow's breast, and the Cane and one of the Claws had what looked distinctly like bullet holes in their skulls. Naturally, a seemingly ordinary method of death begged the question of why they'd been drained of blood post-hoc, but that was the sort of thing that was a Sadish question- not one actually relevant to the situation at hand. The more relevant question was how Scarlet was going to avoid the same fate.
Movement at the far end of the umbilical caught Scarlet's attention, making both her and Khate snap weapons on the source. There was a woman at the far end. A woman with a sponge and a mop bucket. In a word, she was voluptuous, and dressed in the kind of maid uniform commonly depicted in holos and seldom actually worn in real life. She was black haired, but greater detail of feature was impossible for Scarlet to determine at distance. The woman looked straight at Scarlet, then she smiled and waved. Then she wrung the sponge and the mop out onto the floor of the umbilical, adding another wave of thick red liquid to the already saturated floor.
AubreyAubrey waited for Khate to return from the cupboard.
"Well, shall we go? I have the access code."
I do not think you should let them board. I do not think they are friendly.
Situation here is under control. Approaching target. Do you have any information on this ship? Ip'Kip'Ix. Owner unknown, which is odd. Like the buyer's.
Without any form of blistering firepower to point at the newcomer at the end of the bloody hall, Aubrey felt bizarrely left out. It did, however, put her in the best position to listen when the maid put down the sponge and mop and opened her mouth, speaking in a tired, masculine voice that was clearly not her own.
"You have currently located the ship of Varkonius Markuli Davar. Good job. This particular system has also assessed that there is a greater than 75% chance that you're going to try and steal something that you think I have. I'm here to say: Don't even try it." The voice, amplified so it could be heard clearly, was disconcerting in its dissimilarity to the speaker.
"If you're a thief looking to make a quick score, turn around. Hell, look up who the fuck I am, then rethink your plan of stealing from me. If this is specific and you're trying to get something I stole back to its rightful owners or to take it for yourself, tough luck, I make a point of not docking with key cargo still on my ship. In either case, I don't actually mind murdering you, but I don't typically stay in place for long, and that means my maid probably will not have cleaned all of your blood out of the upholstery before I get back. So, I'm giving you this one warning: stay off of my ship. The defenses will kill you, and I don't want to have to get you all over my shoes.""Oh, and don't try to hack the maid. I will find and kill your extended family if I have to clean up your broken body myself and be bereft of her entertainment for the next leg of my trip."After a brief pause, enough to make Aubrey think the message was finished, the male voice popped back out of the maid's lips.
"PS: If you are making a delivery and have been misidentified as a thief, just set your package against my door while keeping all grasping appendages visible at all times. You will probably not be harmed if you don't touch anything."
Kesari (+Boris and Sadish)Kesari replied to Mickaw Tansk, (under the command of Captain Wilcox), like an air traffic controller would--given her experience on a communications station far in her past, trying to remember what Boris used with the Reunion's name, adding in the following after keeping a cool tone of formal signalling protocol. She kept her curiosity to the informal way of speaking aside.
"-...we acknowledge you; state your intentions." She started, adding in the hazard of a refurbished hangar accepting shuttles on short leave notice and making sure that the acknowledgement was to the message rather than an affirmative. She also added the notice that there was a radiation hazard that was still being cleaned up--which was partly the truth given some areas of the Reunion, but if ever any others would go aboard the ship, they would at least need to be prepared.
Although she was entirely sure that she wasn't within bounds of that authority herself, she shifted around to check relaying communications, adjusting the reception so that any received messages would also continue along to all other crew of the Reunion in range.
The shuttles' ID and communication signature is scrambled; can't determine if they were part of the earlier ones descending onto the farm area. As to the ship hailing us, the shuttles I'm talking about aren't the ones which I've just reported [the ones coming from the planet], I presume they mean the shuttles from their gunship.
My mistake on that part. I've inquired their intent and clarification.
"Boris, the rest, I'm going to need your input soon," Kesari spoke over the ship intercomm, "This is a good time for the Captain to chime in."
Boris and Sadish arrived shortly after Kari echoed the gunship's request to the rest of the ship. Boris was his usual ironclad and scowling self, but Sadish had dressed for the occasion in a number of... tentacles. Kesari had seen that particular assembly in action before, to mixed results. Sadish was smart, inventive, and probably most likely to either wipe out a species or a save a planet, but she wasn't exactly a combat specialist. Kari was just glad that she typically had the luxury of looking down a rifle, far from the possibility of friendly tentacle misfire.
"We would to offer a face to face deal," Mickaw replied.
"The kind of deal that certain mutual friends of ours might find dreadfully tedious if they were forced to listen to it."Mutual friend's probably meant the AL-Loy ship. The problem with ship-to-ship communication was that the closer you were, the easier it was to snoop. The encryption Kari had available was probably strong enough to hold up for a while against AL-Loy codebreakers, but, considering what Mickaw was going to propose, it might be nice not to give the codebreakers a chance.
"Only one shuttle is needed to dock initially. That shuttle will contain exactly one person. The second shuttle will land if and when you accept the proposal."
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Topic: Small Mercies (IC) | Death is knocking, and he wants to buy a goat. (Read 52176 times)