AubreyAssuming it is acceptable: Aubrey will cloak and under covering fire advance close enough into cover to 1/set the programmable missile to explode as near to the first soldier (and not Aubrey) as possible 2/Reduce the fire power of those hideous guns 3/While Scarlet and Khate advance, attempt to disable the communications of the remaining two so they can't warn their comrades. Assuming their comrades don't also have full control of the security cameras. Then get the hostages to move up, accessing security imaging as we go to try to keep scouting round the next corner.
Aubrey activated her cloak, getting as close as she dared while Khate clanked forward menacingly. There wasn't much danger of stray rifle fire until the other two soldiers caught up, but she needed to be quick. If the missile was on par with the rest of their equipment, Khate might not be the only one in danger. Explosions in enclosed spaces were bad news.
Aubrey made the cover of the corner with an awkward jump and flap of the wings, her feet skidding in the slick juice of the very dead plants. She extended the focus of her implants more deeply into the control box the soldier was using. He was almost done, but Aubrey worked fast, doubling a single command before the soldier finished and initialized the program.
Aubrey didn't wait to see if she'd been successful or not. She'd know in a moment, for better or worse. She focused on their rifles next, which was tricky. They were hardened against exactly this kind of attack. The metafield twisted in Aubrey's talons, sparks dancing into woven patterns as she searched for an opening. There'd be no time to hack their communications after this, but perhaps...
KhateAdvance loudly, slowly, and dramatically! PD at the ready; their rifles will no doubt hurt, but better to take a bit of rifle fire before getting the paintballs ready than getting a few paintballs off before taking a smart missile.
Invite Tagget, though he's free to use me as mobile cover, remain behind actual cover, or otherwise not act as grenadebait.
Tagget joined Khate with enthusiasm, taking up a position immediately on her left. Together, they all but blocked off the corridor. Even if someone leaned around the corner and started spraying bullets, the damage should be fairly minimal to everyone but them.
That suited Khate just fine, and judging from the sheer unbridled joy crackling through Tagget's somewhat reedy voice, he didn't mind a bit either.
Together, the two mechs advanced with a frightening amount of noise. Tagget's, despite being stripped of whatever offensive capabilities it had once had, was still on a military frame, and it's bipedal stomps easily matched Khate's for sheer volume. Aside from the twin hunks of debris clutched in his walker's arms, however, he was still unarmed- a fact which did nothing to dull his enthusiasm.
No one cursed like an old soldier.
Khate and Tagget passed where she assumed Aubrey was hidden only a moment before the micro-missile rounded the corner. On Khate's view it was an elongated spark, appearing in a split second. The PD gun mounted on the head of Khate's mech clicked faintly as it deployed, but Khate already knew the odds were against it. This was a very small, very fast projectile that was headed...
... very much the wrong way. The missile took the corner, did a ninety degree turn, and then Khate's sensors tracked it doing a second ninety degree turn and zipping right back the way it had come. Khate didn't even have time to consciously thank Aubrey before missile detonated.
The flash of light was briefly blinding, putting Ty's little spark to shame as the end of the corridor briefly drove the optical and thermal sensors in Khate's mech into the red. Pressure sensors on her suit's skin all flashed warning levels as the shockwave hit like a sledgehammer. There was no fireball, but, judging by the sparks and off-color mist filling the corridor ahead, something had ruptured in the corridor that the soldier's had been occupying.
Khate made a mental note to see what the hell kind of missiles those were, and if anyone she knew had them on sale.
ScarletAction: assume following of Aubrey's plan as soon as needed. Assess feasibility of emergency leg-patching on the wounded Cane.
The Cane's leg was bad. Scarlet put the patch on him and taped him as best she could, but it didn't take an apex surgeon to know he was going to need to lose more of that leg when he got back to the closest thing to a medical suite. He'd taken the bullet straight to the radius, and the fractured and propagated upwards. Good news was that he still had three legs to walk on, and the painkillers should get him back to 80% in a few minutes.
Scarlet had just finished sealing the patch and was midway through saying something she hoped was vaguely encouraging when the shockwave from the missile detonating on the other side of Khate and Tagget made both of her ears pop.
She hauled the wounded Cane back onto three legs and barked at the other civilians to fall in behind her. Scarlet might have preferred Khate to take the lead, but, given the circumstance, getting everyone out while their enemies were hopefully somewhere on the near end of the sliding scale between exploded and disoriented was priority.
The former hostages were wobbly and wide eyed after the blast, but they followed well enough. Scarlet pulled them all into the hallway Ty had indicated and then messaged Khate to follow back and stop shooting paintballs/action footage.
BorisKingly negotiation! Start priming systems to: a) jam their communications, if possible, and b) shut down doors to separate their party while they travel. Boris will attempt to ambush and clobber these fuckers on the way to the bridge, ideally like this:
Boris picks a nice corridor he can close the doors to before all of them are through and climbs up above the doorway, using his exoskeleton to hang to the ceiling/walls above the fuckers. When they enter the corridor, Boris/Kesari jams the shit out of their communications (so they can't give the signal to detonate the bomb), Boris shuts the doors in an attempt to separate Mickaw and Sadish from the others or at least lessen the number of foes he has to face. Then he jumps down and beats the shit out of them with all the punching power of a king's converted mining exoskeleton.
Alternatively, Boris emerges from a hidden door or something, but the 'ceiling spider' thing appeals to him most.
If possible, a single (ideally narrow and cramped!) path will be opened for them to the bridge rather than giving them free reign of the ship.
This plan will likely go horribly wrong. Such is life.
Boris punched keys in the door control system with a kindled fury that blocked everything else out of his mind. He was dimly aware of Kesari talking, but no particularly word or phrase rang out as important enough to penetrate the armor of wrath that was growing around him.
This was not the rage of a young man, a hazy and indeterminate blur of emotion and passion. This was not the calculated hate of a cold manipulator, made from ice and wires. Boris was old, and the fury in him was an old thing- made from great immutable plates like the hulls of derelicts, welded together by deep and bloody experience.
There were always invaders. People who sought to invade; to take what Boris owned, to kill those Boris knew, to destroy all he had built. He hadn't stopped them at Strengar. There was no cleaning that festering wound, no unmaking of those mistakes, but he could unmake the men that threatened him now.
Boris left without a word to Kesari. He was dimly aware of her ears flattening back to her skull in a somewhat dismayed expression, but he didn't really care.
The corridor he'd selected ran across the edge of the ship, narrow enough that Boris could touch both walls with if he took a step to either side, but tall. One of the walls was a honeycomb lattice of transparent polymers for observation, and it sloped upwards for almost fifteen feet. If it had been pointed towards the sun, the view would have been glorious. Now, it was fifteen feet of darkness for Boris to cloak himself in.
Boris relied on his Suit's HUD to direct and track Mickaw and Sadish. Their marching order made things difficul: Mickaw at the head, then a wedge of three, then Sadish, then two. Getting all of them together would be difficult. If he could cut the door right after Sadish, he should be able to drop down in front of her, take out the mercs, and keep her protected.
Which meant all that was left was the presentation of the moment. Boris locked the mining suits climbing tools into the wall, hauling himself upwards by degrees. The clamps were best used in zero gravity, with they were effective regardless- if a bit rough on the upholstery. Boris watched his HUD as it tracked Sadish's progress; occasionally consulting the internal cameras to make sure the group was still in the same formation.
Boris tensed as Mickaw stepped through the door into the observation corridor. It was difficult to resist the urge to drop from above and smash the man into so many broken parts, but Boris was not without patience. He waited. Mickaw cleared the door. Then first soldier of the wedge. Then the next two. Boris could see Sadish's face on the other side of the door, her expression deeply sad rather than scared, but then Mickaw raised his fist to halt the group.
Mickaw swept his eyes back and forth as he scanned the empty hallway, searching. Slowly, guided by something Boris couldn't fathom, the damnable man raised his eyes to the ceiling, straight at the bit of blackness that Boris occupied. Their eyes met, and there was a clear moment of recognition.
Boris remotely slammed and locked the door that would have allowed Mickaw's retreat and dropped. Sadish might be able to take two. Maybe. It was the best odds he could buy her.
Mickaw rolled sideways, inhumanly quickly, as Boris hit the ground. He came up empty handed, as unarmed as he promised, but there was a way he held himself that did not fit an unarmed man. Boris knew a threat when he saw one.
Boris, his feet slamming into open floor, swept his right arm in a crude cross chop. It wasn't a refined or particularly martial maneuver, but it was made fast and strong by the mining suit. It only clipped one of the mercies, but it sent him spinning into the side wall. It also put Boris in a position to make a long lunge with his left hand, grabbing the skull of the claw that had been in the rear pair and hurling him into the transparent wall. He hit with a crunch, leaving a slight red stain as he slid down.
The mercenary remaining mercenary was a crow that took to the air, firing downwards in a spray of bullets that send showers of Boris' mining frame. The weapons, primitive by necessity, lacked stopping power. Something tugged inside Boris forearm, but adrenaline and wrath reduced it to nothing more than a warm buzz. The human that Boris had dropped fired wildly from the ground, managing to miss more than he hit, and only peppering the thick armor on the parts of the exo that cloaked Boris' legs.
Mickaw touched his head, just below the ear, and muttered something that was lost to Boris over the din of gunfire. He advanced on Boris slowly, still talking to someone else and taking careful measure of not getting so close that he crowded the firing cones of either of the two mercies still active.
Boris bent over and grabbed the human by the leg, getting his chestplate shot in the process, and hurled the human skyward- directly into the corvid. She didn't dodge, and the pair arced back to the cold floor of the Reunion at the opposite end of the corridor.
Which just left Mickaw.
Boris stepped forward and punched, putting the full weight of his suit and the power of its magnetic actuators behind the blow.
Mickaw caught it. Or, rather, he met the punch with an open palm. He skidded backwards across the floor, propelled back by the force, but not seemingly injured. Any normal person should have had their arm shattered by the blow.
"So this is what your offer of safe passage means," Mickaw said, baring his teeth.
"A path to slaughter, and ambush. I told your crewman that Honor was dead. I'd say it's nice to be proven right, but I think I would have preferred you have at least a little bit of her vaunted integrity."Mickaw flexed his free hand, and the air distorted around it slightly, the light warping around it as though from a personal shield generator.
"I gave my men orders to cut her fins off if you persisted. I'd rather not, but you seem to be the kind of person who only understands languages based in force." Boris had done his best to scramble their communications to hell and back, but there was still a chance that, at such a short distance, Mickaw had gotten a message through. Even if he hadn't, the two mercies locked in with her wouldn't make any positive assumptions. They'd been cut off, would definitely have heard gunfire on the other side of the door, and might be unable to contact their boss. There weren't any good opt-
"Lightbringer is safe"
SadishSadish had been reasonably certain that she was going to die. At first things had been going as well as expected. The mercies were going to bridge where Boris could negotiate, likely a style that was slightly more in line with what Mickaw was expecting. Except that the path that Mickaw had been fed by Boris was winding and indirect. The kind of path that made Sadish feel that very bad things had been about to happen.
Very bad things had happened in the form Boris dropping from the ceiling and sealing her off by herself with two armed mercenaries. She understood the rationale behind it, honestly, with her tentacles she might even be able to handle the two, but she didn't have that. In the time it took for it to occur to her to try and hit them with a fluke or something and try to run, both of the ones guarding her had guns pointed at her.
Their faces when gunfire had broken out on the other side of the door separating Sadish from Boris, the sudden desperate tensing in their shoulders and hackles, convinced Sadish that she was about to die. She was going to be shot.
Then the lights had flickered and died in their section, plunging them all into blackness. Blind, all Sadish had to go by was the soft snick and swish to inform her that the maintenance access to the grav-plating had just been opened. Rapid, soft sounds, like many things moving, had come out of the darkness. The sounds approached, and before Sadish could flinch back, the mercenaries started shooting.
The things that had come out of the floor were rather reminiscent of an undead from a horror vid that Sadish had once been convinced by one of her friends to watch. Canes and claws with patchy hair and elongated limbs, naked humans with uncut hair and unwashed flesh, crows sparse and half molted feathers, all an unearthly shade of pale with black eyes and grasping hands. All eerily silent.
The gunfire was wild and poorly aimed. Something hit Sadishs flukes, and sent a stab of lightning pain up her back. She her rolled in the air, an involuntary movement that probably saved her life as a bullet punched into her side instead of her head. Then all was silent once more.
Sadish felt a numbness spreading from the hole in her side- the kind of numbness that would be replaced by blinding pain once her body got around to processing the injury. She needed help. She needed a surgeon, actual medical supplies, she needed... to stay conscious.
Sadish couldn't see her vision swim in the blackness, but she could feel and hear the rushing of blood in her body. Hands grabbed her and pushed her, noses prodded her, and wings buffeted her. Sadish tried to struggle, without direction, but the motions were weak and faded quickly. She was being guided, pushed, but she didn't have the strength to fight it off. Even if she did, she had the sinking suspicion she was dying.
It was an interesting sensation, worth writing about later if she made it that far. Sadish's last thoughts were of languages, and what word she'd need to describe the vibrating, almost anticipatory, cold that was stealing into her extremities.
KesariWhile awaiting Boris' response, Kesari wondered how to work with the scanners in an offensive mindset. She was well aware that this was a well-done marketing scanner, but not aware on what its potential (or how to abruptly code such) was.
Strike up a match of what the bomb is in our ship's weapons catalog, the type the shuttle is, and project a trajectory course best towards the station--all in the name of...trajectory testing for marketability!
Kari watched helplessly as Boris flatly ignored her and left without a word. He'd had that Look in his eyes. The Look that meant someone would need to replace a sizable section of their face, or their neighborhood. She tried reasoning, pleading slightly, and even a little forcible yelling, but nothing made him so much as look up.
Which left her in charge of cameras and whatever else electronic happened to need to be done, without any direct influence on the events that would unfold down below.
For lack of being able to reason with Boris, or provide Khate with a good answer, Kari settled in to scan the bomb. It wasn't likely to be successful, comparing a seemingly homebuilt device to the records that the Reunion had available. The odds were probably twenty-to-one against.
Of course, there's always the one. The computer pulled up a solitary hit for a bomb that matched the one she'd been able to snap a couple quick scans of from the drone. It was a news article in a trade magazine, but it was a definite visual match. Apparently a group of pirates had crippled a small relay station with one, using the resulting cover to rob an entire freighter convoy blind.
The article went over the additional security measures needed to circumvent a device of its type, and further went on to hypothesize that at least 80% of modern installations didn't employ adequate safeguards. While disheartening by itself, the actual article on the bomb, while brief, was a bit more informative.
The weapon was, by itself, not explosive in nature. Such a device would be detected by even the most lax of weapon scans. No, the power of the weapon was hidden in a place that nearly all security systems are keyed to bypass. The device itself is merely a chemical explosive, not even of sufficient weight to detonate the shuttle, behind a super-dense alloy rod. The detonation of the charge fires the rod like a spear- directly into the shuttle's reactor. Acting has a Seimann reflector, the resulted backwash inside the fusion chamber causes the entire system to go super-critical. While the later stages of the process are easily identified, the shuttle is already in dock, and thus inside a typical station's envelope of security.
Kari looked at the article, then looked back at the scans she'd taken of the two shuttles when they'd been on first approach. Two ships. No weapons.
Heavily modified reactors.
SadishSadish woke up to the truly odd sight of herself. The herself that looked down at her was glowing a brilliant shade of light blue, sort of akin to the color that she imagined her voice would be if voices had color. The holographic her grinned mischievously and booped her with her nose, then did a backflip in the air and shrank to being about the size of a ball of squijum. It raced around the room, providing bright (though rapidly shifting) illumination.
There were two things Sadish noticed immediately about the room. The first was that it was without gravity, not even the semi-gravity that the main ship generated so she could swim through the halls. The second was that it wasn't one she'd ever seen before. Sadish was in a recuperation bed, albeit an unpowered one, and there were multiple similarly large recuperation beds lined up against the wall. Medical equipment was firmly bolted to the floor in a number of places, but several large bins had clearly been crudely roped to the bases of several of the recuperation beds. There was a pair of doors in the room. One rather near Sadish, and marked with a sign saying "Staff Only", the other was at the other end and marked with a sign labeled "Waiting Room".
Sadish turned back to take a second look at the conspicuously clean room. This certainly appeared to be the infirmary, but the infirmary was supposed to be filled with hard radiation and differently hard vacuum. Sadish's train of thought was rather immediately arrested however by the sudden realization that she was no longer alone.
Sitting on the bed adjacent to her was pure white Cane. She was fine boned and, from what Sadish knew of neo-dogs, quite feminine in appearance. The tiny holographic Sadish immediately detached from the wall and began swimming in circles around the Cane's head.
"How do you feel?"
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Topic: Small Mercies (IC) | Death is knocking, and he wants to buy a goat. (Read 52116 times)