Persica
In the end, you knew from the start that the risk wasn't worth the reward, studying Sorawo's ability to cross dimensions was far more important than the lives of twenty soldiers. The men of the Foundation's First were all fully aware of the risks involved when they joined, you refused to allow it be any other way. In this matter, you trusted your advisors expertise on the subject. "Alright, first we'll need to lock down the area and build up a force from local units before we attempt a crossing, if it remains open."
You turn back to the rest of the room, not missing the small sigh of relief behind you, and go about organising the chaos. "Move the rest of First Squad to the site as soon as they have their gear gathered, form a loose perimeter around the area and wait for further reinforcements." At your words the quiet falls away as people retake their roles, you look at one of the communications officers. "Message to the local military units, they are to mass near the site and take over containment when they have a sufficient force, have them separate a few units to support the rest of First Squad as we cross the breach."
You can feel the attention of the rest of the room return to you even as they go about their roles. "As many men as they can spare from containment, nothing larger than a Prowler, we're going to break through and try to recover our lost unit."
The rest of First Squad -and Sorawo- beat the hour estimate you'd made by several minutes as they touched down, the four helicopters reaching equidistant points around the portal anomaly and dropping their cargo. Aside from the worryingly high levels of radiation detected, nothing else came forth to attack them as the local military units scrambled into place, forming a ring around the site and keeping solid containment.
The military at least came through on your request, handing over command of several hundred men and their fresh off the factory line Prowlers. With containment established, the remaining half of First Squad and an additional 60 soldiers were picked from the group as the crossing vanguard, a smaller detachment of five allocated specifically for protecting Sorawo as she went about her work.
The clock officially marks one hour, thirty one minutes and seventeen seconds after First Squad disappeared as the time Sorawo does... whatever it is she does and disappears with half of the 80 men assigned to the crossing. With communications unable to cross dimensional boundaries, there is nothing you can do but wait for them to return, in success or failure.
.....
Thomas Janssens, Foundation First Squad
The crossing occurred so quickly that despite the warning you were taken off guard, it was if you had blinked and everything suddenly changed. The barren earth that you had been standing upon replaced by something startlingly alike bare metal, you quickly raise your weapon and look around, more than slightly alarmed by the fact that you seemed to be inside a cavernous space filled with shattered and warped metal, only overwritten by the presence of actual liquid Collapse Fluid flowing down through cracks in the ceiling then through the floor you were standing on, it was actually pooling into small lakes in several places in the gigantic room.
Your thoughts are driven from your mind as one of the Prowlers near the left beeps an alarm and begins firing on something, joined shortly afterwards by several others as they track something far off in the darkness of the badly lit room. "Contacts present! Form a perimeter." The other forty or so men quickly scatter in a rough circle, trying to find pieces of solid cover amongst the wreckage and avoid the spots that made their CFR detectors screech at them.
You don't manage to find a place before the floor rumbles and the distant echo of an explosion rushes past you, a small blip of light visible in the darkness for a moment. Then, the other half of the unit, made almost entirely of military proper arrives and you commence with the plan. "Holding force, defend the crossing point at all costs, if we aren't here when the lady says to leave, you go without us." You had already explained this to everyone before leaving, but with the sudden shock of the crossing and combat it was always good to hammer the plan home.
"Advance force," Another blip of light, even further off in the distance followed shortly by a small rumble as the explosion passes you -they weren't equipped with explosives of that size, what is causing that?- "We move to those explosions, that has to be the rest of First Squad." The perimeter collapses and reforms as you advance off in -your compass spins wildly, pointing nowhere- somewhere to the right of where you arrived, closer to one of the walls of the gargantuan cavern you found yourselves in. As you set off, the rearmost Prowler begins unspooling the cable spool that had been jury rigged to it's weapons emplacement, ensuring a hardline of communications and a path back to the portal should all else fail.
The military guys look around nervously as the Prowlers beep their warnings, rapidly aiming and sending bursts of gunfire off into the dark to either side of the column, but as the vanguard the remaining twenty men of First Squad push forwards relentlessly. You see endless piles of broken scrap as you pass, most of the damage old but some of it at least looks recent, keeping your abject confusion to yourself as you steer around a pool of Collapse Fluid large enough to hide a building in it.
This place is completely fucked, it must be where the shit is coming from. It looks as high tech as anything you've ever seen, if not for the decrepit state of the place, you'd easily put it above anything else you've ever seen. You turn your head to look at some floating and faintly glowing orb thing as you pass it, relying on the camera mounted to your helmet to record everything for analysis.
The column abruptly comes to a stop as you pass a faintly flickering blue light, mounted high atop a pole, because you suddenly find yourself somewhere entirely different. The front two Prowlers beep and begin laying down a withering line of fire before them at something, when you look back to see what happened you just see empty space, a similar but cracked pole holding up a calming blue light atop it. More importantly, you are now nowhere near the unit you were trying to rescue. "Back, everyone back!"
You almost run into the rear of the unit as you cross back over, a quick burst of shouted orders bringing things back into order. "Around this pole, some kind of teleporter." The men heed your words, even as you abruptly take note that one of them that was beside you on the other side of the pole no longer was. You put it out of your mind to deal with later and focus back on the path forwards, almost stumbling as the broken wreck of a Prowler emerges from the dark before you, looking a lot like a crumpled tin can.
"One squad stay here and extract the memory core from that, then return to the portal." One of the military units from the back peels off as you leave them behind, the bright beam of their Prowlers laser pointer disappearing into the darkness as it turns away towards something.
The results of your mad dash finally begin to show themselves as the wall of the cavern comes close enough for you to see, a gigantic monolith of cracked and warped metal leaking the ominously glowing fluid from a thousand cracks. Though you can't see them over the wrecked piles before you, the distinctive sound of a .50 reaches your ears, short bursts rather than the long staccato your own Prowlers were using. Low on ammunition. Prowlers carried a lot of ammunition, but not that much, especially not for the .50 calibre variant.
"First Squad, do you read?" The short range burst of radio felt like something of a forlorn hope, you could barely hear from the squads at the back of the formation, but you feel your heart leap when someone attempts a reply, the message garbled beyond intelligibility, but it was a message. You absently acknowledge a short Fifteen Minutes from the messenger cable as you turn past a particuarly large, and humanoid, pile of scrap, finally finding yourself in sight of your wayward squadmates, illuminated under a large blue spotlight as they huddle against the wall.
Their only operational Prowler is standing a short distance ahead, scanning the darkness around them and taking occasional potshots, while one other lies embedded into the wall some thirty meters up, the last completely absent. Hanging over all of them from it's place on the wall is some kind of... heavily armoured mechanical spider thing, short waves of something emanating that makes your stomach turn as the emplacements on the body swivel and shift, firing out at something unseen. You see the three frontal Prowlers swivel to target it before just... stopping and going back to scanning the black around you. The fuck?
Your radio crackles to life as your unit forms a circle, the fire from the Prowlers only growing in intensity as they fire at something. "You need to leave, right now! The thing that brought us over here is still around, it's intelligent, you need to get back across and warn them." The strong voice of your friend and commanding officer, Arthur drives right over any objections you could have made. "This thing over us is some kind of security drone, it's been keeping that thing off while we try to open this door, but I don't think it can actually stop it. Tell them that this place is far bigger than you could imagine, we found a holographic map of this facility, it's big enough to cover Europe and half of Russia."
The gunfire behind you suddenly slacks for a moment before restarting a bit quieter, a small blip in your ear alerting you to the fact that the rearmost two squads life support signals are no longer connected to the net. "It's here, you need to GO, we have this door open, it can't fit through here."
There was so much you wanted to say, to demand explanations and reject running, you could make it to them, it wasn't too much further. But the light illuminating the rest of First Squad abruptly disappears as the spider droid crumples against the wall, whatever force acting on it driving the cracks open as Collapse Fluid begins to leak through in small rivers.
You need to...
[] Stay just a little longer, they are only a few hundred meters away, you can reach them.
[] Pull back, the commander of First Squad has spoken.
-[] With everything you have.
-[] Load as much of your supplies onto some of the Prowlers as you can and send them over to First Squad.
[] Write In...
