AubreyActions in order of priority: flee away from Khate towards the door as fast as possible. Whoever can needs to get out, hard. Maintain interdiction of the crows’ interdiction. Turn entire room into an epilepsy risk with massively bright random millisecond pulses until the lights blow. If random is not possible, consider using pulses to send the message “SPA TREATMENTS RULE OK. PS I AM VERY STABLE KHATE DAMMIT”.
Wonder if my cloaking is still on.
A few seconds ago, things had been looking fairly terrible for Aubrey. Her cloak was gone and recharge would require too long for it to be useful again in the imminent future. She'd managed to hop back over to take cover behind Tagget, but that had largely been because the two neo-crows in powered armor hadn't seemed interested in shooting her. After Scarlet's wall of flame had gone down and rainbow dog had attacked her, the pair had crushed Aubrey's subversion of their interdiction, then they'd basically ignored her physically while stopping her hacks cold. Individually, Aubrey pegged them at 80-90% of her own skill, which was still damn good, but, one-on-one, she could take them down. Together as a pair, undoubtedly with some nice integrative suite built into their armor, they could shut anything she tried down- hard. Counter interdiction? Nope. Flashing lights? Nope. Comms scramble? Nope.
That, however, had changed the instant Kesari's ad-blast hit. For people who weren't getting audio piped directly into their ears, they just heard the PA system screaming about... that. For the pair of crows, hyper-keyed into every datastream in order to block or control it as needed, the sudden information overload was shockingly effective. Their coordination broke down instantly as hundreds of simultaneously overlapping advertisements and worse slammed against their filters.
Aubrey struck hard in the window Kari had opened for her. She revived her attempt to control the lights, changing intensity, angle, and (where possible) color to random extremes. The hostel turned into a rave worthy lightshow, adding further confusion to the screaming advertisements that seemed to only be growing in intensity and broadcast density.
That done, Aubrey twisted her talons, linking the sympathetic arc to the interdiction field and
rending. To their credit, the pair of crows tried to fight her as she tore their work apart. Operative phrase: tried. They didn't have the millisecond perfect teamwork they'd had a moment ago, and Aubrey had grown more used to dealing with chaos than most of her kind.
Aubrey broke the interdiction field and obliterated the architecture behind it. She had no idea what Varkonius was going to do with it, but he had his window.
VarkVark looked up at the pair of massive cannons pointed down at him. Had interdiction not kicked back on evading the lumbering brainfish would have been trivial- even with a hole in his leg. Without the ability to jump... He probably just gained a couple more cracked ribs. Which would rapidly become secondary to the near complete disintegration he was about to experience. The gunpuppy had gone and run off directly into the multi-color cane, which, he admitted, was probably going to make great footage later assuming that anyone survived to get it exported.
Wilcox loomed over Vark. Vark considered converting to some religion so he could jump on the 'heaven' bandwagon. Then the erectile dysfunction advertisements started, and a split second later his jump rig gave him the green light to open another bore. Erectiled dysfunction didn't exactly have the lethal flash that Vark enjoyed, but hell, he could dig it if it saved his life.
"Weird, it's like they know you," Vark said, quickly mentally keying in a new bore from his position on the floor.
Sadly, Wilcox did not respond and give Vark the extra couple seconds. He fired a pair of high power plasma cannons at point blank range.
Vark's bore opened poorly, the calculations only partially complete. It absorbed the weapon blast but shed hard radiation in an aperture bloom that tripped half the ionization sensors in his suit. The exit was even sloppier, turned the hard beams into a messy pulse that hit Wilcox's shield with a wave instead of a focused point.
Not that Vark had been aiming to punch a hole in the Mech's shields. He just wanted to knock Wilcox's back into the wall, which the pulse managed proficiently.
"You think that amateur's trick is going to work on me? Boy, I'm going to-Vark pinched the tip of his pointer finger into his thumb. There was a single beep from the charge he'd planted on Wilcox's battery core. Then it exploded, sandwiched between Wilcox and the station bulkhead. The primary explosion didn't do much more than destroy Wilcox's battery. The secondary explosion of the battery in Wilcox's mech blowing out tripped the rest of the radiation sensors in Vark's suit and blew apart the ceiling, floor and walls. Most importantly the walls.
It was always shocking how little there was separating a room full of people from hard vacuum.
KhateKhate was most of the way back to Vark, ready to help with (or at least ready to survive) whatever he had planned, when he blew Wilcox's battery. Which meant she was staring straight at Wilcox when his back exploded once in a ball of flame, and then again in a brilliant violet explosion that breached the station bulkhead like it had been made out of rice paper and prayers. This had three immediate effects.
1. Wilcox, hopefully dead, was propelled directly at Khate at absurdly high velocity.
2. The hostel began decompressing out through the new hole like a hurricane.
3. The value of Khate's footage spiked faster than a hedgehog in a brothel.
Khate flattened herself to the floor, the force of decompressing air still propelling her towards the hole. Wilcox flew over her by inches, cannon balling into one of the power armored crows with a horrific spray of metal fragments. Ka-taeun, sadly, did not get incidentally crushed. Instead, he was... elongating.
Every part of Ka-taeun was stretching forward, reaching to snag onto any part of Khate. At the point of impossibility, where he looked more like a stretched piece of Cane shaped taffy than a real creature, His front paws burst open, producing thick tendrils of raw looking flesh that whipped through the air like vipers.
Khate bolted. Her claws gouged the floor as she pushed off, and the decompression wind propelling her forward so she barely touched the ground. According to her suit, she went through the breach at slightly more then 90 m/s. Varkonius was ahead of her, drifting in the hostel's debris cloud at only slightly lower velocity. He was looking at Khate, or rather, looking past her.
Okay, you're going to need to move slightly faster if we're going to make this work.
Khate tucked herself up and fired her paintball guns to put herself into enough of a spin in order to look behind her. Ka-Taeun was barely recognizable. He wasn't a Cane anymore, he was some sort of bizarre fuzzy rainbow colored space caterpillar, growing towards Khate at a surprisingly rapid pace. The space caterpillar thing was going to touch her before she reached Vark, and despite its appearance, Khate had feeling that would be a Bad Thing™. This left her exactly one option.
She had to fight rainbows with rainbows.
It took a second to orient herself so that the paintball auto-cannons didn't put her into a spin, but Khate subjected Ka-Taeun to an endless stream of riot grade neurotoxic paralytic paintballs. Whatever personal shield he had was apparently capable of forming itself to his altered shape, and the balls themselves splattered harmlessly against it, but it didn't let him defy physics. The impacts pushed him back, and the paintballs pushed Khate forwards. Ka-Taeun writhed, a living example of the saying; in space, no one can hear you scream in frustration that your quarry has escaped your nefarious clutches after covering you in rainbow paint.
Khate was too focused on keeping a steady stream of paint directed at Ka-Taeun's 'head' that she didn't notice she was drifting directly back through a bore before she'd already fallen through. It snapped shut the instant she was through, revealing a surprisingly close view of the other side of the Flounder. Khate didn't get much time to admire it before her back end slammed into something painfully solid.
Oi! No autographing my ship with your ass.
Khate twisted carefully, getting her feet into a position where she could clamp them onto the surface of the ship she'd just butt slammed. It was the ship that they'd approached, found the blood covered umbilical, and subsequently abandoned. Varkonius was fiddling with an EVA port, punching a series of combinations into the outer lock. He hauled it open after a moment and beckoned her Khate through, cycling them both through the airlock.
On the other side was the rest of Varkonius ship, which looked disturbingly like a high-end terrestrial apartment. They appeared to be in a large area that was simultaneously the bridge, kitchen area, fire control, TV lounge, communications, and, if the oversized grav-bed in the corner was anything to go by, master bedroom. Varkonius, however, was too focused on extricating his panther from the EVA bag to give Khate the tour. He grabbed the bag away from Khate and unsealed it, carelessly rolling Scarlet out so he could get his arms around the panther and haul her out of the bag. Both of the occupants appeared to still be alive, though there was a great deal of pooled blood left over in the collapsed bag and Scarlet's arms were still a mess of bruises.
Varkonius grabbed the panther in bear hug, looping his arms under its front legs and carrying it over to the dining table.
"Cass, medical assistance, now!" Vark shouted as he laid the panther out and began pressing his hands over the bullet hole in its side.
A cylindrical cubby next to the grav-bed cracked open, and the far too well proportioned maid from earlier stepped out. Her skin and clothing rippled briefly as she approached, turning translucent blue and jelly-like before reforming into a slightly taller, much more realistically bodied woman in a white medical coat. She looked at the bleeding panther with a clinical sort of disinterest.
"That is an injured jaguar, sir.""THANK YOU NURSE OBVIOUS, TREAT HER!"Cass leaned forward, then frowned slightly.
"I'm sorry, sir, that is an injured jaguar. I am not programmed to handle veterinary practice. Your leg is injured, shall I commence treatment?""FUCK MY LEG! Do something for HER!"Cass' eyebrows furrowed in a rather realistic look of confusion.
"I can perform euthanasia. How shall I fuck your leg, sir?"Khate began to sense that Varkonius was in danger of blowing up his own ship in sheer frustration. Scarlet, meanwhile, still appeared to be conscious, her eyes flickering open to look up at Khate and the ceiling with an expression that was at once pained and dumbfounded.
"You," Varkonius hissed, pointing a finger directly at Khate.
"What do you know about medicine?"
ScarletScarlet was not dead. This surprised her slightly. She'd been exposed to what she assumed was Sadish's 'Vera', but she'd failed to explode. Her nanites informed her that they'd lost the ability to contain the infection, and yet she as not dead. She'd been stuffed into a bag containing a live panther, and the injured animal had spent most of the trip hugging her with blunt paws and making rather pathetic mewing noises rather than mauling her. It had been an odd day.
Now she appeared to be Varkonius' house/ship, staring up at Khate from the ground while trying to process what her nanites were telling her.
Pathogen cannot be contained.
Antigen cannot be locally synthesized.
Boosting primary functions in order to retain consciousness.
Holding infection at key points.
Estimated time until internal power failure: 32 minutes. Seek medical assistance immediately.Scarlet felt like she was twitching all over, and her vision swam whenever she moved, but she could move. Hell, her arms were exceedingly weak, but she could move them a little too. With a bit of luck she could even stand unaided, though that might be asking far too much of her body at this point.
AubreyAubrey stared at the blank steel of the door that had, up until a moment ago, been open to the hostel. Closing it had been a split second judgement call, one that had probably saved the lives of the hostages, but also one that had locked Khate and Scarlet on the other side. Khate would make it- that was just who she was. Scarlet... Scarlet had been hit, and not just a bit of a scrape like the slug that had hit Aubrey's wing. Scarlet needed real help, she needed to be back on the Reunion with Sadish.
Of course, Kesari's messages weren't exactly encouraging on that front.
Painfully aware that she was the last member of the away team actually on board the station, Aubrey turned back to the former hostages. They were universally wide-eyed, and many had flattened themselves to the far wall. Decompression was something of a recurring nightmare for most spacers, and considering that their current defense from that decompression was a single door, they had a right to their fear.
The pair of hostel staff that Khate had rescued were being straightened up by the others, and they both offered thanks that was equal parts profuse and incoherent. It was a situation that Aubrey wasn't entirely comfortable with, and one that only ended when a sound both singular in its volume and alien nature cut them off.
"BLLEEEE-EHEH!"Every eye turned instantly towards Ty. Ty shrank back a little, but the small and panicked looking goat she was clutching in ther tech-harness stretched its neck defiantly toward the observers.
Tagget leaned forward and poked the goat in the nose with tip of one of the pieces of debris he held as clubs. The goat promptly attempted to bite the debris.
"Tyva, when did you get a goat?""Umm... He just kind of scampered out when the red lady went in, and I sort of... you know, grabbed it," Tyva replied, gently trying to tug the goat away from the piece of debris it had decided to lock into fearsome battle with.
"Can we keep it?""We'll talk about it later, when we're far away," Tagget said diplomatically, turning slightly to face Aubrey.
"Which I assume is where we're going?"Goats aside, leaving sounded pretty damn good to Aubrey. If Ka-taeun had truly been vented out into space, that afforded them an excellent opportunity to move
very quickly off the Flounder before everything went completely pear shaped.
Aubrey gathered up the hostages once more, put Clarke and Ty in the rear to yell if they saw anything horrible happening and lead the front with Tagget. Aubrey, thanks to a mixture of her own and Kesari's efforts, had a map out of the station. Right now that didn't need a strong rear guard, they needed speed and the ability to bash through anything that got in their way.
BorisHead for the hangar and the shuttle, leaving Mickaw behind. He'll probably be fine. Execute whatever insane plan Kesari has been hatching up.
Boris jogged for the hangar at the highest speed his suit could safely manage. A thousand things occupied his mind as he ran, some more positive than others. Judging by the bleeding, Sadish had been alive, you didn't bleed like that if you weren't. Despite her often... frenetic and eccentric nature, she could do a fair job of taking care of herself in a pinch. Yet the way she'd disappeared, the
thing he'd found, and the voice that had told him that 'Lightbringer' was safe... it added up in all sorts of uncomfortable ways. At the moment, however, he couldn't afford to divert focus to those problems. Right now he needed to rendezvous with the away team and somehow get them a bore back to the Reunion in order to hopefully avoid the wrath of Ka-Taeun's vessel. At least, that's what Boris thought Kesari's plan was. He might have missed a step or two in there somewhere, but he thought he got most of the important bits down.
In the hangar bay, Enesch was standing outside the shuttle. His expression as Boris bore down on him at a run made it very clear he was trying to quickly decide whether he should try and shoot Boris or greet him.
Thankfully, he attempted a greeting. Which Boris pointedly ignored. Enesch attempted to sputter something interrogative about Mickaw, but relented and backed off after Boris gave him the Evil Eye and clenched a fist at him.
Inside, the shuttle was disgustingly whole and well maintained for a mercenary vessel. The manufacturer was probably still in business, and it didn't look like any part of the shuttle had been replaced with anything but factory specifications. Boris hated it instantly. It had no character, no spirit, no life of its own. Even its start up sequence was flawless, not even requiring a single recalibrating kick- that was the kind of luxury that inevitably led to soft handedness and complacency.
Hunched behind the controls, Boris managed to get the hangar to open properly on the third try, and exit from the Reunion was quick after that. It was the trip in between the Reunion and the Flounder that was boring. It was, like nearly all space-flight, empty, tedious, and only made tense by the persistent knowledge that, if Ka-taeun's vessel had any inkling of what Boris was doing, they'd turn him into drifting scrap before he could even come up with a decent epithet.
Boris was nearly ready to start querying the station for docking procedures when things started to get interesting. Part of the flounder exploded. The shuttle's HUD immediately flagged this with an irritatingly helpful exclamation point, and further noted that there was a significant atmospheric jet accompanying the discharge, likely indicating multiple rooms or a single large room involved in a depressurization event. If any of the away team was involved, Boris would arrive too late to help, but it at least let him know that they were still alive and fighting. Or had been.
The Flounder's auto-docking sequence had been shot to hell by Kesari's AIDS virus, which meant Boris had to spend an irksome amount of time fishing around for a hard lock. At least the shuttle itself didn't fight him too much on that. It was designed to be used by mercies who didn't particularly care if their target wanted to be docked or not. The seal was made, grudgingly, and Boris punched the manual release with a somewhat unnecessary amount of force.
The door clicked open, sliding apart to reveal a pair of soldiers in steeply angled armor, both of whom had carbines leveled at Boris' chest. They didn't look like the talking type.
The one on the right suffered a critical existence failure when what appeared to be a large chunk of a grav-bed smashed into him from behind. The second jerked to look at what happened to the first, which gave Boris the opportunity to lunge forward and grab the soldier's gun, tear it out of his harness' hands, and smash it repeatedly against his helmet. Boris stopped hitting three or four swings after the soldier stopped moving, tossing the hopelessly bent remains of the short rifle aside. It was a problem with hi-tech weapons, they didn't make the greatest clubs.
The source of the earlier chunk of debris proved to be a Fin in a walker, standing a little ways down the docking row. He had a second large chunk of debris ready to throw, but there was Aubrey right next to him. She had her wing raised to halt the fin, an act which displayed a large amount of partially dried blood covering the feathers of that wing. Behind her was a substantial crowd of various races, all staring at Boris and actively trying not to cower. There was also a goat in the arms of one of the felids. The goat waggled its feet at Boris impudently.
Step one, find away team, partial check. He had Aubrey, though Khate and Scarlet were not in evidence.
KesariKesari felt pretty good about herself. She'd beefed up AIDS to enough of an extent that it could infect the Flounder's systems. She wasn't exactly sure how she was going to remove it, or even if it would be possible to do so without a couple days and the ability to shut down the entire station's system at her leisure. It didn't particularly matter at the moment- they'd hopefully be VERY far away when the bill came in for fixing the station. The PA system, unfortunately, seemed to have buffers designed to prevent multiple overlapping messages or sub-hypnotic riders, most likely an incidental effect of software designed to make the signal clearer when announcements were made. Still, Kari had coaxed the Reunion to pipe through one of the more disturbing advertisements in its repetoire. Everything else but the PA system had received one of two cocktails. Kesari's enemies had received a never ending stream of Spa advertisements, random clips from historical war videos, children laughing, test tones,
classical music, screaming animals, speed-metal, mathematical formulas, and greatly amplified audio slipped in from some of the worst elements of Khate's download history.
Her allies, meanwhile, got something to help them in their
solemn hour, along with a couple remixes from her old days. It was an odd time to miss being a DJ, but it had been a brief, bright period- even if it hadn't ended up being her calling.
Sadish"I suppose it's not surprising...at least I have another mystery to solve while I'm here. Is there any way to communicate with these holograms? I believe they were created as parts of my 'digital soul', to put it poetically. If they're like me, they have been learning about these poor creatures, and maybe trying to help them. If only with a bit of light."
Action: Think about ways I could communicate with the hologram programs, unless provided an answer. Something I would think of. Because they might be like me?
Aimasc shrugged.
"They don't make really make much in the way of sound, never anything sensible anyway. They're definitely advanced, but I gave up trying to get them to do anything some time ago. I had once hoped they'd help me talk to the rest of you, but that was an infuriatingly fruitless endeavor." Sadish nodded to herself, then beckoned one of her mini-me duplicates over. It obligingly swam through the air and began diving in an out of Sadish's bedding. It took another couple of moments for Sadish to get its attention with one of her displays screens, one that showed a large whale-moji making a skeptical face. The little hologram stopped, bumped into the screen once, and then formed itself into Sadish's whale-moji for 'Barely-Contained-Laughter' before exploding in a shower of blue sparks.
It reformed on the other side of the room, winking at Sadish before turning into a glowing blue cake. Almost immediately, eight more mini Sadishes swam through the walls of the room and circled around the cake. Each one tried to tug for a part of the cake, but none of them couldn't get any of it free. This went on for a couple of seconds before the entire group of glowing holo-clones turned to synchronously regard Sadish with sad eyes.
"That's... different."
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Topic: Small Mercies (IC) | Death is knocking, and he wants to buy a goat. (Read 52171 times)