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Thread: [M] Galactic Empires II

  1. #141
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    "I'm surprised there's only one collector," Iona frowned. Why wasn't there more coming down on them? Surely the alpha who'd impaled itself on the ship noticed their return?

    "What's to stop it signalling it's here?"
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  2. #142
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    "There." Ella said, gesturing to a slowly moving blip on the scanner. "A collector, small pack of combat drones with it as escort, or scavenging from its leavings. Damn, I think I can hear it." She shook her head. "It’s the first I've seen on the scanner. Do you want to hit it now, or move on?"

    Sayori was struggling to hear anything over the Berserker noise sliding greasily through her mind. It was only after a moment of silence that she realised the question had been directed at her.

    She looked up at Ella, to find the red-eyed Elemental already watching her intently. It felt wrong; to have the military leader deferring to her as if she were the true authority here.

    Not just me. she thought. The thing I’m carrying.

    "I'm surprised there's only one collector," Iona frowned, looking surreally out of place in her human child-form. "What's to stop it signalling it's here?"

    Sayori scrunched her nose, trying to find a brief enough way to convey the (hardware, protocols, codes, equations, failsafes, logic gates, emergent behaviours…) understanding that Cronus had avalanched into her brain.

    “They can signal each other.” she said at last, “But they’re not all connected. And they rely on ultraviolet and sound more than they do radio.”

    She looked at Ella.

    “This might be our best shot at getting what we need. I say go.” She thought for a moment. “When she woke us up, Gaea used her suit to soundproof the cryo bay. Could you do the same thing?”

    Ella’s eyes flickered downward as she chewed her tongue in thought. “I could, but I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. Gaea was always better at manipulating the fields than me. It’d be up to you to kill the bastards.”

    Sayori glanced around the group. Now that she truly understood the Collectors - what they were for, and what they did and why - she hated them all the more.

    “What do you say?” she challenged the others, feeling the savage, tense grin creep back onto her face.
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  3. #143
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    There was a moments confirmation, and a few more moments planning.

    Ella counted down.

    "Go!" she yelled over the comms as she threw her arms wide. The room and corridor became muffled, deadened, as stun grenades tumbled into the room. Arc white flashes of light bleached the room, and marines and the survivors poured into the room on their heels. Unfortunately, all the flash bangs seemed to do was warn the berserkers that they had company. One hunter, twisting impossibly through a hail of gauss slugs, landed on a marine and plunged claws into the joints of his armour. The Charabidians scream was cut short as the Hunter flexed artificial muscle bundles, and tore the marine in two, splitting him apart in a spray of gore that froze when it hit the deck. As it tensed to lunge, Tris plugged a plasma round into its torso, and it reeled back. Tris blanched as the blood spattered horror recovered its balance, a smoking hole punched through its torso he could see the wall through.

    "tris" it hissed in a static laden voice. "tristritritiritristi . ."

    Winter was at Tris's side, in a moment, and her shotgun boomed once. The custom shredder rounds punched the monster back and onto the deck with massive damage, where it twitched as Winter stomped a power armoured boot through its blank skull.

    Two more of the Hunters had gone down in the opening salvo, pure weight of fire slapping them down and tearing them apart. A third had nearly made the line before Vezarres, roaring in anger, slammed a torn free chunk of deck plate into it like a baseball bat, sending it reeling in three separate pieces.

    The Collector had scuttled back into the darkness of the room, sobbing like a frightened child before there was a bang of pressure change and a wave of blue light that spread from the Collectors shifting, insectoid hull.

    "What. . .how" Ella gasped as she slumped to her knees. "Its popped the field! Fuck, its popped the sound baffling! Kill it now!"

    The marines opened fire even as its final guardian scampered away into a vent, the room overwhelmed by a thunderous avalanche of sound and noise as a dozen rifles opened up on full auto. Thousands of rounds tore through the Collector, until it finally fell, smashing drunkenly into a stack of empty of cryopods and scattering them with an awful noise of breaking glass and metal on metal.

    For a moment, the collector hissed and sizzled on the deck, and the place was eeirly quiet.

    Then the screaming began. An awful crescendo rising through the abandoned halls of the Elcano.

    "Scrap it quickly, and lets go!" Ella snarled as she pulled a pistol free. With barely a flinch she pumped a round into the fallen Charabidians skull. "We just ran out of time."

  4. #144
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    After the battle plans were made Miranda took up a position on the edge of the corridor she had climbed onto a damaged bulkhead giving her height above the others. She set her rifle up putting the silencer on then flipped on her holo-glasses. From here she had a nice makeshift sniper's nest. When Ella threw the flash bangs and set up the sound barrier the glasses filtered out the flashes. It was odd not being able to hear anything. She was outside of the bubble so when the fighting started she didn't hear the chaos of the battle. It was like someone had hit the mute button on a holo-vid.

    From her perch Miranda picked off targets where she could. She noticed a Marine being backed into a corner by a berserker. She took aim and pumped several rounds into the berserker knocking it back enough for the Marine to get away. He looked around bit trying to see who had helped him but couldn't locate Miranda and was drawn back into the fighting.

    The blue flash blinded Miranda briefly despite her holo-glasses, they adjusted quickly and as strange as the silence was it was equally strange when the sound suddenly came back, it was deafening. Somehow Miranda managed to hear Ella's command to take down the collector. She redirected her fire to it until it dropped to the ground. With the order to retreat Miranda jumped down from the bulkhead, the silence was back but only for moment then all hell broke loose. “Fuck!” Miranda shouted then grabbed a frozen Marine by the collar forcing him to run.


    Another round of bullets hits my skin. Well, fire away
    Cause today, I won't let the shame sink in. We are bursting through
    the barricades and reaching for the sun.

    We Are Warriors


  5. #145
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    Sayori lowered the steaming barrel of her thermal pistol and ran towards the butchered Collector, crunching over the broken glass that it had scattered in its death throes. She could hear the escaped Hunter scrambling away through the ducts, the metallic battering shot through with a more deliberate thump that she now knew to be a warning to its fellow Berserkers. They were already responding; Sayori could hear them rising like a wave, screeching and snarling.

    "Scrap it quickly, and lets go!" Ella snarled as she pulled a pistol free. With barely a flinch she pumped a round into the fallen Charabidians skull. "We just ran out of time."

    Sayori was already up to her forearms in the biomechanical viscera of the Collector. Slick black oil and other, worse fluids coated her hands and jetted sporadically from the beast’s ruptured innards. She could see the transceiver, glowing yellow against her augmented vision. Hair-thin cables snapped as she closed her fist around it and yanked it free.

    “I’ve got it!” she called out.

    “Then let’s move!” Ella countered.

    Sayori gritted her teeth, trying to shut out the screaming that seemed to be coming at them from every direction.

    No, she realised suddenly - not every direction.

    “Aft.” she said, pointing.

    One of the marines looked at her sharply. “You said your base was between the science decks. That’s forward.”

    “I can…” Sayori began angrily, then swallowed her irritation as she realised how the words she was about to say would sound. “I can hear too many of them forward. Aft is quieter.”
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  6. #146
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    She fired each round with precise at her targets. Pumping the shotgun over and over like it was an automatic thing to do in her head. Once she hears a click and nothing shoots from the barrel, she had to reload as quick as she can for each second counted. She followed the others as they were on the move and when Sayori had got what she needed. She kept her eyes on enemy movement. Pumping her shotgun again and fired the weapon several times before following the others.

    Vezzarres roared as he fiercely fought each of the demons that came after him. Ripping their arms, legs or whatever they use to move around apart from their bodies. He stopped and looked around their surroundings.

    "We just ran out of time."

    He looked to see another Demon was close to pounce one of his allies. He quickly moved and tackled the demon to the wall and punched through his body ripping out the parts. He watched it die slowly as he foot crushed the skull of whatever or whoever it was before. "Move quickly!" He hissed.

  7. #147
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    "Incredible" Nikos grunted as he careful hefted the transceiver from the scan bed. "This is not just a transceiver, its a reservoir of quantum entangled matter. There was a theory floating around, before we left, that the only source of naturally occurring QEM could be found in the hyper dense corona of Neutron stars, maybe even in the ejected matter and radiation from their cousins, Pulsars. God, this even explains the weight of the Berserker units. We always wondered why they where so damned heavy in action and suddenly light on death. They must have a nanoscopic magnetic containment bottle, which contains a neutron of this matter. Enough to add kilograms of weight. Look at this aperture. I bet the main role of the Collector units is to implant each independent unit with the QEM it needs to operate the berserkers IFF network. Fascinating. I bet the collectors are recalled to the mothership to 'refuel' as required."

    I like him the Cronus copy clicked and hummed in Sayori's skull as the science team, accompanied by Ella Salk and Gaea, watched Garrick work through a sheet of bomb-glass. Garrick was clad in a suit to protect him from any contaminants, using a variety of tools to slowly, carefully, inspect the transceiver inside a clean lab.

    The trip aft had been harrowing. Another firefight had brewed up as pursuit units chased the team, and they had had to turn and fight again to throw of their pursuers. The rest of it had been spent crawling through dead, compressed decks, alternating between as cold as the void and hot as hell. Eventually, a freight elevator shaft had allowed them to get to another entrance to the baffled and bostoned science labs.

    "That's great doc" Gaea interrupted. "But how long? We've got hunter units sniffing outside every entrance. If the collectors can beat our gravitic baffling now, they might be able to hear through it as well."

    "Not long." Garrick looked up to his audience and gave an exaggerated 'thumbs up' with his thickly gloved hands. "If you let Sayori and our Sentinax friend help, I can have a working prototype in an hour with the auto-fac."

    "I don't know if I like letting. . . whatever is in her head near the auto-fac." Someone else might have looked at Sayori and offered a 'no offence', but Gaea didn't. "Its our biggest point of failure."

    I like her too. It hummed like a server fan. Decently paranoid security is worth its weight in gold.

    Ever since the copy of Cronus had been implanted in Sayori's head, it had been learning at a startling rate, analysing her own knowledge and memories to make its interface as smooth as possible. It answered any question put to it, and had offered to activate a radio transmitter so it could talk more directly with the crew. Garrick had been ecstatic. Gaea and Ella had been. . .less keen.

    "Without Sayori, two hours. You military types should be coming up with a plan, by the way. We need to isolate and capture a single berserker drone, and either bring it into our labs to function as a bomb carrier, or set up a workstation somewhere in the ship. Either process will carry some risks."

  8. #148
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    For once, Sayori was holding her tongue and simply slouching near the back of the group with her arms folded. It seemed prudent to let good old Nikos make his analysis of the QEM without her - or rather, without Chronos - being seen to influence his conclusions one way or another.

    Despite Nikos' enthusiasm for the idea, she had been somewhat glad when Gaea turned down Chronos' offer to talk to them directly. She would rather people kept seeing her as Doctor Sayori, rather than The Lady Who Happened To Be There Whenever They Needed To Speak To The Alien A.I.

    "Without Sayori, two hours." Nikos was saying to Gaea.

    "One more hour won't make much difference." Sayori spoke up, shrugging. "If you and Cicero want to field this one, I'm happy to help colonel Sanders make everyone lunch."

    That was a bare-faced lie, but again it seemed like the prudent thing to do. Fighting down the urge to huff, Sayori supposed that she might still be able to find something useful to do. She had already handed off the override gun to Garrick's team, and captain Severt's mission log to Gaea - as promised, one copy for the Elemental to keep in her suit, one for Nikos to keep in the lab, and a third that they'd eventually leave on a beacon by the Gate. Perhaps she could start brain-dumping Chronos' knowledge down on paper, in case anything happened to her before they made it home.

    If we make it home.

    She toyed with the velcro flap of her jumpsuit pocket, where Severt's other, more personal data chip was nestled. She still wasn't quite sure of the safest place to keep it.
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  9. #149
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    "We set up here."

    Gaea and Ella had spent an hour combing through the sensor net the survivors had laid on their expeditions into the Elcano. The location chosen, was somewhat ironically, the chamber they had recovered the survivors from.

    "Its a good distance from base, it has conduits with power and atmosphere. Its not on a crush deck and its only got one entrance, and its linking corridors can be defended by a few fireteams." Ella pointed out key locations on the map.

    "If we have to defend it, we're screwed already." Gaea interjected. "We can't fight these things head on, we've learnt that."

    For a moment it looked like Ella would argue, or even dress down Gaea for insubordination. Instead, she bit her tongue.

    "So we'll have to work fast. We lug our equipment and the payload to this bay, trap and disable a berserker nearby, then haul our prize in and modify it. At that point. . .well at that point we then need to figure out how to convince it to head back to the mothership." Gaea drummed her fingers on the console.

    "Sayori, any ideas from . . .Cronus? Can you pilot it in, like the drones?"

  10. #150
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    Sayori - not relegated to kitchen duty after all, but still unused to being the de-facto authority on everything - drummed a boot against the crate she was sitting on. Keeping her attention on her foot stopped her from glancing round and catching herself in the semi-reflective glass panels that separated the sensor module from Garrick's makeshift lab. Miraculous as her new senses were, seeing herself with red eyes freaked her out a little.

    It could be done, Cronus pulsed in her ear, But...

    But it would take more time to modify the drone. Sayori mentally finished.

    Before she could make a mental list of the components she would need, Cronus was already flooding her brain with step-by-step images of where and how to connect them to a Berzerker motherboard. (Or at least, what passed for a motherboard on those things...)

    She chewed her tongue as she considered Cronus' input.

    "I might be restricted in the route I could take, 'cause of losing the link." she mulled aloud through her thoughts. "And there's a chance one of the other Berserkers might trace the signal. It'd be more secure to program it to return to Zeus and then send a detonate code. More secure still to put the bomb on a timer...but the more we automate it the less control we'll have if something goes wrong, and the chances of something going wrong are..."

    She scrunched her nose.

    "...really fucking high."
    Last edited by Azazeal849; 01-22-2020 at 09:13 PM.
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