[M] Galactic Empires II

[Enigma]

Iona nodded, heading towards the lockers. Unlike the others, she didn't have a weapon - or rather, she was the weapon, able to reshape her limbs into blades, whips, or hammers. Or she could throw herself at them and devour them whole. Raised on a diet of minerals, humans were disgusting fare

But this enemy would eat back at her. Really, her only choice at the moment was to throw something and hope to do damage. She needed to incorporate alien.... biologic-created projectile or energy beam weapons with herself, or carry their weapons as they did. Perhaps she could claim something within these lockers?

Assuming they were still there. And working.

[AngelDellaNotte]

Before leaving the safety of their home base Miranda had gone through the make shift armory looking for suitable weapons. She had managed to somehow find her pistol, identifying it by her initials being embossed on the grip of it. Though she hadn’t such luck on finding her rifle, she did manage to find one that was the same model however it lacked some of the modifications that hers did. Name the ability to preprogram her calibrations. The rifle did however have the ability to calibrate it while dry firing. For most people this was enough however living as the daughter of a gunsmith it wasn’t enough for Miranda. She preferred calibrating with live ammo. It only made a slight difference that hardly anyone would notice. They didn’t really have access to the ship’s range and that sort of activity would draw the berserkers right toward them so she made due with the dry fire calibration.

Traveling as they did may have unnerved Sayori but Miranda was used to it. Having people ‘stall’ a patrol was a common practice in the Lyran military and actually made her feel safer. She knew that Darvvy’s position was far more dangerous than their own as he was by himself cut off from the others. Usually it was a detail performed by a Marine though there had been times Miranda had done it though it was only in controlled exercises. In the hours it took them to get to the bridge Miranda fell into a familiar routine, though she kept her head on a swivel knowing if they were attacked she wouldn’t be hit with a stun round which while quite painful wasn’t fatal. Each time Sayori’s drones made an unnatural noise she growled low in her throat most of the time resisting on sending the scientist a glare. Another reason she hated the things. They didn’t know how to move stealthy. All it would take is for the berserkers to pick up on their noise and they would be in a firefight in tight quarters. It would no doubt end in a blood bath and who knew how many would make it out alive.

When they entered the bridge Gaea went after the two berserkers, Miranda raised her gun up to shoot one of them but the elemental was moving too fast and she couldn’t without risking hitting her. Though it seemed that Miranda’s assistance wasn’t needed as Gaea quickly dispatched them. As the other set about their own tasks Miranda started at first to move to the helmsmen console, muscle memory taking over. It had been two years since she last piloted this ship technically but it felt like only days. She had to stop herself and redirect to the Captain’s chair. There were several streaks of blood on it along with a few hand prints. It could have been Captain Severt’s blood or any other member of the command staff. Miranda wondered what happened to the Captain she hadn’t seen her in the safe zone and no one had mentioned where she was or what happened to her. If Kromlyn was here he could take a sample of the blood and know for sure. Miranda pulled a knife from her pocket that she had found in the armory and scrapped a bit of the dried blood into an empty wrapper of some rations. She would take it back and let the doctor check it out. Captain Severt was a fellow Lyran and she had to respect that. Plus the woman seemed good at her job.

Miranda stood before the chair staring at it for a few moments not sure if she should sit down on it both due to the respect she had for the position the chair represented and the fact that the Captain’s blood could be on it. The fact of the matter is someone’s blood was there. Navigating the panel wasn’t really possible standing next to the chair so after a few seconds of hesitation she sat down. The blood was long dried and the ship nearly destroy. The blood extended to the panel and she had to soak a towel to clean it off. Once the blood was cleared she typed in the access codes given her unlocking the panel. She looked around trying to find out anything but the files were either encrypted or damaged. After several minutes of frustratingly searching she slammed her hand down the panel streaking away some more of the blood.

There was something etched into the panel with the looks of it being done with a laser. To most people it would just be some random marks looking sort of like runes. Which was exactly on the mark. When the Lyrans had broken away from the Terrains they had used the runes to encode their transmissions since they used the same systems as the Terrains. With them they had been able to keep their movements secret. It wasn’t used much anymore except among the elite of the military and taught mostly as a status symbol. Miranda had learned it while at the military academy and though she was a little rusty she was able to make out a series of gird references as well as a random string of numbers. Taking a chance she typed the numbers into the panel earning a couple beeps as it unlocked a layer of security. Great a hacker she was not. With the new access code she was able to look up the gird references up on the panel noticing they pointed to a section of the planet covered in jungle. Judging by the readings that went with it the area was habitable and they were in orbit around it. She zoomed out looking around the space near them she observed a large mass near them. It was big enough to be considered a moon, bigger than any ship or station she knew of. This had to be how the berserkers got on the ship. “Oh wow, Gaea you are gonna want to see this.” Miranda said, pulling the images of the jungle and the mass on the main screen.

[dakkagor]

Iona

One of the lockers revealed a small arsenal of weapons. One was a mazer, a microwave pulse gun perfect for shipboard combat, alongside a small stash of pistols and shotguns. The others had been stripped bare, leaving only a few maintenance supplies. Even the ration packs had been picked over by someone else, leaving slim pickings.

The Team

Gaea walked over and looked over the terminal.

"You getting this Cicero?"

+I am. I also have a stable line to the ships systems in that region. That mass alongside us is four times the biggest military super-capital I have on record, and twice ours. A unit that big and mobile should be impossible+

"Ten years ago mobile shielded units where impossible." Gaea growled. "I hate that word. Vez, what did those scratches say again? Planet and safety?" She jabbed her finger at the spinning green orb. "the command crew left these clues for someone. They are down there."

+Yeah, thats all great and all. But you have incoming.+

"How many Davrry?" Gaea's helmet snapped shut and she hefted her rifle.

+Half dozen pushing up from the local medical bay. Three closing on the drones at the power junction.+

The emotionless helmet swung to fix Sayori in its gaze.

"We're out of time. Pull the plug. Winter, Miranda, with me. Where there's a pack there's more. We punch through then let our distraction cover our retreat."

Gaea pulled the hard drive from the terminal, and tossed it to Sayori.

"Lets go."

[Enigma]

Iona took the maser, checking its charge, and slipping one of the shotguns over its shoulder. Spare shells and charge magazines it could not find, but the weapons would be useful back at base.

It gathered everything it could find, including the maintenance supplies. It was amazing what one could do with so simple a source. Now at least it had something to fend off these... distorted biologic seekers that could devour them.

Iona turned to see how the others were fairing at their tasks.

[Azazeal849]

"Half dozen pushing up from the local medical bay." Davvry reported clinically over the comm, "Three closing on the drones at the power junction."

"Well don't we just keep discovering bold new frontiers of suck." Sayori muttered, feeling her cheek muscles pulling her face into a nervous grin.

She had clambered two of her drones down into the bridge with them, ready to run van- and rearguard as they had on their slithering journey to the command centre. The other two were still up in the Jefferies tubes, standing sentinel in the maintenance switchroom. As a critical hub for comms and propulsion control, the bridge had two 100%-sized LV feeders in a duty / standby arrangement, and a third redundant feeder for emergencies. Tripping all three would surely bring any nearby Berserkers swarming to investigate the problem - which was exactly Gaea's plan for covering their escape through the medical bay and then back into the interdeck maintenance tunnels. They could have simply shut down the power from one of the bridge control consoles, but with Berserkers infesting the ship's systems, there was no guarantee that they couldn't simply undo the team's efforts with a counter-command. That left the manual circuit breakers, located in the interdeck switchroom.

Three closing on the power junction.

Sayori snapped her forefinger and thumb together to sync her visor with the first drone, powering up its sensor feeds with the haptic command. She saw one of the switchgear cabinets hovering in front of her eyes, the idling drone's hands already curled around the breaker levers. She blinked at the corner of her visor and a curtain of warm yellows and cool blues descended over her view. She turned her head left, the visor view shifting as her drone mimicked the movement. The breadcrumb trail of Nevarn's sensors tagged themselves onto her overlay, forming a crooked line back through the tunnels, but the heat-map itself swam with murky orange as the distortion of heat-bleeding cables and coolant pipes muddied the picture. But in the distance were flickers of red.

Even through the drone's eyes, Sayori felt her heartbeat beginning to tick in her throat. The thermal pistol Vezarres had found was a lead weight in her off-hand. There were two hunters, long-limbed shadows with skittering movements, and behind them the undulating centipede form of a collector. (Fucking faces!) The three Berserkers blinked and fractured, melting in and out of the orange background like ghosts. The reticules on Sayori's visor boxed in around one only to leap away onto another, trying to isolate the nearest threat against a sea of cloaking heat-wash. Her vision tunnelled, like looking through the wrong end of a kaleidoscope.

"I see them." Sayori confirmed, finger-clicking away the view. She realised that her voice had risen, constricting alongside her dry throat.

Gaea's emotionless helmet swung to fix Sayori in its gaze. "We're out of time. Pull the plug. Winter, Miranda, with me."

She pulled the compact hard drive with its precious copy of the ship's besieged AI and tossed it to Sayori, who caught it in both hands.

"Let's go."

Sayori pocketed the memory block and clicked back to her drone's vid-feed, knowing what she was about to see and dreading it. In the time it had taken her and Gaea to speak, the Berserkers had moved closer; still ghosting in and out of view as they passed background hot-spots, but always growing larger - single minded, relentless. What had given them away, Sayori wondered. Hijacked internal sensors? Distress calls from the two hunters they had killed? The hack into the Elcano's mainframe? The answer didn't even matter.

Sayori curled her right hand, ready to transmit the pulse that would make the drone haul down on the two circuit breakers and plunge the bridge into blackout. And then she hesitated, suddenly aware of the potential flaw in Gaea's plan. If she triggered the bait now and brought the Berserkers swarming before they had broken through the perimeter, then they would be trapped by far more than the six Davvry had spotted up ahead. She finger-clicked away to her third and fourth drones, powering them up and running them to join Iona and Vezarres by the doors that Gaea was levering open. As the drones’ heat-vision sight overlaid her own, Sayori caught glimpses of the other six Berserkers crabbing through the maze of corridors towards them. Their blade limbs twitched as they moved, almost as if they were swimming through the amber soup of the heat-bleed around them.

"Doc." the Elemental soldier crackled warningly. "What are you waiting for? Kill the lights."

Sayori knew she was supposed to obey, not question. That was how the command structure needed to work. But she was sure (knew!) that she had the right of it here. The delay would cost her time to extract the two drones up in the interdeck switchroom - and for all their solid construction, their carbide plates and cybermesh muscle bundles were not designed to resist the slashing fury of Berserker weapon-constructs. If the hunters caught and killed them, they wouldn't be easily replaced. Worse, if they picked through the wreckage (it's constantly learning...it kills us to learn about us) they might find Cicero's latest hack-proof codes and study them until they found a workaround. But the alternative was to potentially lose the whole team. Once again, Sayori imagined herself reduced to a howling skull, plugged into the belly of one of those monstrous collectors. Would it use her voice, she wondered, to scream at the next human it caught in its red laser-sights? Her stomach turned to water at the thought. She didn't wish that fate on anybody - not even the irascible Winter, or that Lyran neo-nazi Miranda.

"You need to clear our path first." Sayori countered Gaea's order, stubbornly swallowing her fear. "Or we could all get trapped when the reinforcements come."

[MidKnight]

Vezzares looked at the scratches one more time before giving a confirm answer. He had to ponder for a moment before he could give an answer. 'Planet...safe.' It couldn't have been that obvious, but what did the remaining scratches mean? 'History...Ruin...Hope.' He remembered old calligraphy to use a code. He didn't think the young warriors now days would use it since technology has advanced among his people. He growled softly as his talon clawed at his neck. Deciphering old words had left since the time as Chief left him.

"History..." He finally said. "Ruin and Hope." He pressed his arm band and repeated the same words as a recording. "Sometimes when we use calligraphy...we use as a code to alert others of the situation that occurred. Or a warning." He stood up and continued talking to the recording. "Once we used the word 'ruin' as a sign of destroyed or destruction. History..." He growled one more time. "Once referred to a past reference should we found anything like data logs or information." He takes another look at the last word. "Hope." He tapped his chin. "Hope is new to me...we have never used it since we finally banned together under one flag...and that flag was Verath's." He stopped talking when he heard Gaea talk about a incoming pack. "Demons." He muttered. He picked up the heavy weapon and placed it on the mule near him. "I can smell them now." He sniffed several times.

Winter looked over her shoulder and listened to Gaea talk on her headset. She looked to the Doctor who seemed more worried about the pack that was on it's way. She walked over to the woman and placed her normal hand on her shoulder. "Get your shit together." She said softly to her ear. "We got this." She put a tight grip on her shotgun and cocked it. The sound a of shotgun filled her ear with joy as she smiled to walk behind Gaea and prepared for a fight. She lowered her weapon pointing at the ground. "Ma'am...ready when you are."

[Enigma]

Iona frowned, hefting the maser when she heard about the incoming invaders. Did they set some sort of alarm in here? They didn't seem to be that advanced.

But then, what did they really know about these creatures?

They were patient, apparently.

[MidKnight]

She quickly rushed to the corner and waited for what was coming to them. The monsters that lurked in the hallways seeking their presence. Leaving the area quietly was out of the question itself. She looked to the frightened woman Sayori and to the other's who both seemed terrified and dumbstruck at the same time. Vezzarres and Iona were unfazed of the situation though she thinks Vezzarres had done something like this before.

She ready's herself and looked to the other woman. The Lyran Pilot. She gives a slight smirk before making her own move and pushed herself off the wall and side stepped to the hallway. The monsters had detected her and yet looked not surprised at her ambush tactic. Aiming the shotgun at her first target was standing in the open. Her eyes caught the attention at the first creature that charged at her. It was a horrible sight to see and yet she moved quickly to aim the gun in it's direction. Pulling the trigger the shotgun made a rather loud noise as it burst's out a slug round into it's mark. The creature falls back but get's back up again.

"Shit!" She cursed out loud. Her flesh hand cocks the slide back and forth reloading another shell in the chamber. She aimed one more time and fired again. She repeated it over and over until it stopped moving. "Just fucking die!" She yelled at the monster. "Hey Mira!!!" She called out to the Lyran woman. "Are you gonna just stand there and fucking shoot or what?!" Then she laughed as she placed a shell in her mouth and reloaded her weapon. Her metal hand slide each shell quickly like it knows the pattern all too well. Finally takes the shell out of her mouth and loads the last round inside.

She quickly rushed to the Lyran woman. "Or you can stay behind me so your pretty face won't get fucked up!" She aimed at the monsters and pulled the trigger. Each shot was loud and drowned out the sounds of the machines scream. Moving forward and out of cover she continued popping rounds taking down each target that tried to get near her. She even kicked one that ran up to her like a dog off a leash. "You like that?!" She began taunting. "You want a little more?!" She fired another round into a machine laying on the ground.

She punched one that got too close with her metal arm and apparently felt a hard tug pulled on her. She pulled back and growled as she closed her fist. Her other arm was free but was holding with shotgun. "Dammit!" She yelled. Struggling to get the machine off while holding her gun was a challenge. She managed to get the shotgun barrel into whatever was clamped onto her arm and pulled the trigger. Taking a few steps back and looked at the marks on her metal arm. She growled again and fired quite a few rounds into the machine. "That shits expensive!!!" Then kicks the back with her foot.

[AngelDellaNotte]

Typical marine, rushing head first into danger without thinking. Some would call it courage but Miranda took it as stupidity. Rushing into danger while brave was moronic without tactics. This was why Marines usually traveled in large groups so they could outnumber the enemy with their large numbers. Using them as fodder to wear their opponent down. They had it drilled into their brains that they were invincible even though that was far from the truth. Stupid if you asked Miranda, Quentin had tried to explain several times that there was more to it than that but she never listened to her sister. Normally when Quentin started talking she tuned her out as it always turned into a lecture.

She rushed forward ignoring Winter's taunts and took a position behind one of the control stations near the corridor bracing her rifle on her shoulder. She reached into her pocket pulling out her hologlasses putting them on and activating the heat seeking mode. She could see Winter's form 'courageously' rushing in. She noticed the beserker reach out and grab Winter. Setting her sights on the monster she tried to find a target but Winter kept getting in the way of it her shot. She took a deep breath and held watching as Winter shifted pulling away from the beserker. Miranda took that moment to pull the trigger causing a bullet to whiz past Winter's head hitting the beserker square in it's head. She let the breath out taking aim again as the creature just staggered back. With another held breath she unleashed four more rounds into the beserker's head all but one hitting its mark. Another thing she didn't understand about Marines was just blindly shooting and hoping you hit something. Ammo like all their supplies wasn't something they had a lot of.

[Azazeal849]

Sayori's hands were clammy inside her interface gloves. She could hear it now; the same cockroach-skittering that had hissed towards them in the cryo-bay full of rotting corpses. They're here. The dry, overheated air of the command deck felt thick, pressing down like a physical force.

And then the tension exploded, like a split pane of glass hit by a bullet.

Gaea wheeled at a corner, and the Elemental's shout of "Contact left!" was lost against the sharp bark of her rifle. The sound of the gunshots ricocheted back down the corridor towards Sayori, along with the jarring static scream of the Berserkers. Somewhere out of sight, a voice that she knew wasn't really human screamed at Gaea to hold her fire. Stratford pushed away from the wall, and the Lyran Sinclair-Clarke surged after her.

We got this. Stratford had boasted, but it was difficult to tell from the shouting and gunfire up ahead. Sayori took a brief moment to wonder just where the hell Davrry was, as her body clicked into action and she broke into an adrenaline-powered run. Running towards the gunfire instead of away from it - it felt unreal, but the heavy claw-thumps of Vezarres on her left and the lighter footfalls of Iona on her right drove her on. The robot mules click clicked along obliviously, and her two point-drones whirred behind as they executed a simple, automated Follow command. Their carbide footsteps echoed without her direct control, but the time for stealth was long gone.

The corridor ahead was bullet-holed, the ground strewn with scrap metal and swarf. Stratford was kicking some unholy fusion of a deck-plate and an industrial press off her bionic arm. Traps, Sayori thought feverishly, They're smart enough to set traps. She couldn't see any of the Berserkers - they seemed to have melted away further up the corridor. She could hear metal-on-metal clicks through the ceiling vents, and she couldn't tell if the air ducts were amplifying distant sounds or if the machines were stalking through the inter-deck crawlways, watching and (constantly learning) reassessing their prey. One thing was for sure: they hadn't given up the hunt.

Pull the plug. Sayori brought up her visor's video feed with a tap of her fingers, linking to one of the two drones still standing inert in the command-deck switchroom. Orange and yellow heatscape changed back to ordinary camera with a blink, and she could see the drone's carbide-plated arms extended before her with its fingers wrapped around the circuit-breaker levers. She could actually see the arms vibrating, the link transmitting the misfiring stress-responses from her brain as if they were commands. Isn't that fucking cool? she remembered telling her colleague at Phayder. Not right now it wasn't. Again, she found herself cursing the lack of time she had had to fully debug the factory-model drones.

Still holding the thermal pistol in her off hand, she wrenched both arms down. A thought visualising the gesture would have been enough, but she couldn't take any more chances. Scale One.

She saw the drone's hands move as if they were her own, and from somewhere behind her a loud ca-chuk signalled the bridge electronics going dark. The sound of the air-fan motors above her head ceased, the thrumming becoming a soft whir of sliced air as the fan blades spun down. Sayori tapped her middle fingertip to her thumb and the second drone's vision sprang up in front of her own, its hand also ready on a circuit-breaker marked LV-3. She pulled her right hand down again, cutting off any opportunity to re-route power through the redundant cable. She didn't wait, and immediately set the drone into a sprint - fleeing back towards the junction where they had dropped into the bridge.

As she climbed the drone down, something silver-grey slammed silently down in front of her vision. It was hunched and skeletal, with a smooth eyeless head. Hunter! Even though the image was remote, Sayori almost yelped aloud. The three stalking Berserkers had found the right Jefferies tube and were bearing down on them, not half a minute behind. If she had switched back to the drone's heat vision she might have seen them. Hell, if she hadn't muted her audio feed she might have heard them coming.

The silence was surreal as the Hunter tilted its blank face, almost curiously. Then there was a flash of silver blade-limb, and Sayori's visor exploded with static and blinking error messages.

Sayori's startled horror exploded out of her as a string of expletives, jumbling together English with Korean and Japanese loan-words in broad, unfiltered Pan Pacific.

"They've reached the bridge." she warned her comrades as soon as she had the wit to speak coherently. The power outage might draw in more Berserkers to clear their path, but now they had found her drones would they be smart enough to work out that she had been using them to trip the nearby circuit-breakers? Would they simply drop into the bridge and follow the sound of the guns to their real targets? Her heart was thumping in her neck, and the data drive with the ship's precious AI on it was burning a hole in her jumpsuit pocket.

She had to distract them.

Crabbing sideways along the corridor wall, Sayori switched drones with a press of her fingertips. In the interdeck switchroom, the second drone released the breaker levers and sprinted for the breaching point. Through its eye-cameras, Sayori saw two Hunters clinging to the ceiling like spiders, while the Collector extended its segmented body to haul her other drone back up into the Jefferies tube. The drone was still active, she realised as an overlay marker boxed in and tagged itself around the machine. Not disabled, just blinded by the Hunter that had opened up a ragged metal slash across its head cameras.

Sayori switched back, click, static, ERROR ERROR and imagined swinging her right fist with all her strength.

Tapping back to the second drone revealed chaos, and the Collector recoiling with a gaping hole smashed through the cluster of mandibles that passed for its face. Its spearing red laser-light had gone dark. Sayori almost thought she could hear it shrieking with her own ears, several corridors away - but with the team's gunshots still ringing in her head she couldn't be sure.

One Hunter dropped onto her first drone, and the two vanished through the hole into the darkened bridge. The second skittered along the ceiling towards her camera view, clinging with razor claws. It was humanoid, but its joints were all wrong, twisting and swivelling like a broken marionette. And it was fast.

Sayori threw the drone forward, underneath it, aiming straight for the writhing Collector. The larger construct reared, plates shifting, dark-eyed skulls leering from its underbelly as wires and panels slithered over them. It shifted into its combat form, a mechanical centipede unfurling iron claws.

Sayori hated it so much that fear became reckless rage. She put all of the drone's quarter-tonne weight behind the charge, and smashed its fists into the Collector's underside.