"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."
Gaea paused, then nodded.
“I'm glad we pulled you along.” The Elemental turned to Miranda and Winters. “You heard her! Move like you have a purpose!”
+++++
“Contact left!”
It scuttled out of the darkness shrieking, and this time Gaea was ready. A grenade pumped out from the underslung tube launcher on her rifle, and covered the horror in white phosphorus. It shrieked again and collapsed as Gaea let it have a sawing burst, carving it in half, the arc light flames casting monstrous shadows as the team advanced.
Winter had dashed forwards into the darkness, firing like mad and then stumbling over a trap. Gaea reached out at the same time as Miranda plugged the horror clamped to Winters bionic arm. She felt its unique mass, and swung her rifle down to face a nearby panel as it began to lunge towards her. She plugged a neat seam of shots into the gap between its armour plates, and it clattered in half .
“Winter! Get back here!” She slammed a grenade into the tube. “Davrry, where the hell are you?!”
Only mocking static.
+++++
Sayori's desperate fist strike with the drone flopped the collector onto its back, where it began to beg with an all too human voice. She watched, as in a trance, she set her drones on it, adrenaline pushing her hard as they tore limbs out, ripped out cortical stacks and processors, and sank metal fists into giving, too organic linkages. One of the drones turned at a contact marker, only for the berserker flanking it to come apart in a flurry of parts and a spray of hydraulic fluid.
She hoped it was Hydraulic Fluid, anyway. Davrry dropped down next to the drone, and fired again, killing another berserker, then a third. He worked his massive rifle with inhuman precision and speed, slamming power packs home and ejecting them between shots, each shot perfectly placed as half a dozen contact markers, then a dozen, then two dozen, began to swarm her drones motion detectors. The whole deck was infested.
“Jobs done Sayori, get the drones out!”
She didn't need to be told twice. The drones limped clear, covered in berserker gore, and after a moment Davrry joined them.
+FIRE IN THE HOLE!+
+++++
The ship shook and groaned. Gaea winced as she fired off another burst.
“What the hell was that?!”
+Fusion mine. Found one rigged above the bridge. Seemed like it had been left for a berserker to scuttle the bridge. I re-purposed it.+
The lights died, and the corridor was filled with a sudden roaring.
“Breach!” Someone yelled, and Gaea realised that the panicked voice was hers. “BREACH!”
+++++
The fusion mine had punched clean through two layers of advanced armour, by infernal chance finding an elevator shaft and breaching into a voided deck space. The air around the team, previously stifling hot, suddenly turned into a roaring tornado as it exploded past them into the emptiness of space.
That was when Iona was hit.
The drone lurched out of a door way, and immediately tumbled as the team hunkered down in their sealed suits and prayed to whatever gods they held dear that the breach wouldn't expand. It slammed into Iona, and for a moment the horror flashed past them all: a withered, decayed Charabidian, shot through with crude cybernetics, vomiting a hot stream of grey sludge over Iona, who fought back with a rippling mass of stabbing silver tendrils. Vez shot out an arm and grabbed Iona's leg, only to be rewarded with the berserker drone turning on him, puncturing his suit through his neck and back. The huge, ancient lizard roared in pain and punched the horrors head clean off, but reflexively let go of Iona to do so. Both Sentinax and drone tumbled away down the corridor.
Iona just managed to catch a bulkhead door, and pulled her self in as slammed shut, neatly snipping off the bottom of her left leg. As the roar subsided, gravity and light kicked back in from some secondary power source and the team thumped to the deck.
+I'm ok.+ Davrry drawled over the radio. +And you won't believe how many berserker's we just spaced.+
+++++
Sayori looked around through her active drones. They where in a different section to the rest of the team, an ammo dump for one of the missile launchers by the look of things. Davrry was resting against a wall, and had popped his helmet to screw a cigarette into his mouth.
“Hey, Sayori” He nodded to the drones. “Good job.”
In truth, Sayori wasn't sure how she had got the drones to follow the Lyran sniper. The last few minutes had passed in an adrenalin driven blur. Davrry lurched to his feet, and looked up the missile feed.
“Gaea, I'm going to lead the drones to homebase, my own route. Get the rest of them home”
+++++
Gaea nodded, her wiped a gauntlet over her mouth. They were battered, but alive.
“You heard the man, lets move out.”
+++++
“That was reckless! Stupid and reckless!” Garrick yelled, stomping back and forth.
“Worked though.” Davrry responded. “We cleared out two whole decks of the fuckers, more perhaps. And we rolled the ship, broke the umbilical connecting us to that super-cap. Can't be bad. Hell, we even vented off a lot of heat build up, and took back about a dozen key systems when their nodes rebooted.”
“And the drones were a success.” Nevarn piped up. He had taken a full download from the drones on their return and was busily crunching the data “And we got Julian back, right?”
“Not quite.” Garrick sighed. “The IT crew tell me we didn't get an instance. We got a static copy. Codes and data and full architecture, but not a working AI. That slows us down.”
“Then maybe we should investigate the planet next.” Gaea leaned forwards. “The coordinates Miranda pulled, and the message left in claw-speak, indicate it could be the place the command staff is hiding.”
“I'm all for a trip dirtside.” Davrry put in. “But that super-cap is still out there.”
“I think we have a solution for that. The pioneer corp packed an infiltration shuttle into the main hold, and it was never deployed. Its designed to slip past even modern sensors, gliding into atmosphere and making transfer at sub sonic speeds with a gravity effect field.”
“You'd need an insane pilot to fly an unpowered brick into an alien atmosphere.” Garrick countered. Gaea glanced to Miranda, sitting nearby.
“Or a supremely confident one.”
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