CW: Violence & Gore
"What do I do?" you asked, tearing after him, but he didn't need to reply. Everyone was already stumbling into the broadcast room, Cache already sitting at one of the stations and reaching for one the screens. Vector sprinted past for the cockpit, heavy boots ringing off the deck grating.
"Radar picked up six at the junction and a dozen more right behind!" Sprite called, sitting at the operator's table desk and pulling a screen over. It lit up with dozens of dots, wavering and dancing in blue and white, a pattern of weaving particles that faded and reappeared. "Booting up the turrets!"
Chrysalis took over the screen from Cache, grabbing the neural jack and slotting it home before tapping out instructions. She pointed to Thrash and indicated to you, and you followed the entry protocol on autopilot, unsure why you were doing it. You grabbed the long, gleaming steel spike, lined up up carefully, and slotted it home, and Thrash closed his eyes and tensed as the program initiated.
"Why are we plugging in, what's going on?" you asked as Chrysalis pushed past you to the interface screen.
"They're taking over the guns."
"What about the EMP, won't it-" you started, but then the whole ship rocked and tilted as it suddenly accelerated.
"We can't. We're too close to the surface, they'll have warned their friends," she explained, tapping in commands too fast to follow. "If we hit the EMP here their friends will be all over us while we cycle the reactor, and we don't get a second use. We have to get low enough to cut them off from home before we hit it."
"Shit. What do I do, should I..?" you indicated to the chair. She shook her head.
"Only got two guns, Alice. Open that locker, go!"
You followed her finger to a recessed door in the wall, fumbled a moment looking for the latch, then pulled it open. Inside were several devices you didn't recognize, but atop them all were a dozen assault rifles of some kind, heavy blue-black blocks with long plastic magazines and a nest of optics. You snatched two off the rack and turned to throw one to Chrysalis, but she was already there, pushing it away.
"The
arc guns, dumbass!" Sprite called from across the room, as Chrysalis grabbed one of the bizarre devices from the lower shelf and hefted it. It was enormous and crude, a mass of wires and baffles with a chainsaw grip and a fold-out screen like a camcorder. She pressed it into your hands and took the other.
"The rifles won't even go through their shells. This is what we got," she explained, engaging something on her weapon. There was a high-pitched hum as the screen booted up and something inside the baffles started to glow. "Switch on the top to turn it on. Point it at the squiddie and pull both triggers. High-powered laser makes a channel of ionised air to the target, then the capacitor dumps and pumps it full of lightning. Same tech as the EMP, but targeted. You gotta let them get close though."
"How close?" you asked nervously, engaging the on switch. The weapon hummed in your hands; it was already disconcertingly warm.
"Too close. Let's hope we don't need them," she said.
"I gotta be careful, right, not to damage the rest of the ship, if it's like an EMP…" you mused, and Sprite laughed.
"If you need to use that thing, collateral damage is the last of our fucking worries. Just burn the fuckers if you see them," she said. "Jesus, they're fast, they're almost on top of us.
Shit."
You moved around to see the screens, the dots closer and bigger now. One of the displays switched to what you assumed must be an external camera, showing the pitch black of the tunnel lit by the weaving searchlights and arcing glow of the repulsor pads, pipelines and wires whipping past at unbelievable speeds. There, through the grain, you thought you saw something like a mass of red lights.
"Is that-" you began, but then all sound was drowned out by a sound like a drumroll. The whole ship reverberated with it, loud enough you felt it in your ribs. On the camera, there was a massive continuous fireball in yellow-white as what looked like a pair of antennas turned out to be a pair of autocannon. Somewhere above you, there was a cascade of metallic ringing as spent brass rattled down an enormous chute and through the walls.
The red lights danced, and one of the dots blinked out. Then a dozen more appeared.
"TORPEDOES!" Sprite called into her headset. "Incoming, incoming! Fuck they're-!"
The guns rumbled again, then the world turned sideways and you met the ground hard, scrabbling for a seat as the whole world twisted and turned. The metal roared and screamed in protest, interspersed with the tempo of the guns and punctuated with even louder crashes. On the screen, the dark blue world of the tunnels was on fire.
"Eight hundred metres, they're right on top of us! They're firing! Brace!" Sprite called, as you reached for your seatbelt and fumbled with useless, shaking hands. The guns fired again and Chrysalis screamed, her hands over her ears. Sprite's eyes were locked to the screen despite the tears rapidly welling in them. There was an overlapping sound like paper tearing and the sound of firecrackers, and sparks rained down around you.
You tried to follow the cameras. The turrets were still firing, the sound now muted in your abused ears to a constant background rumble. Their tracers stitched wildly through the tunnels, tearing apart the walls and bursting ancient pipes as they tried desperately to follow their targets. They were no longer distant, moving with a liquid grace through the fire and devastation, moving with one mind like a swarm of fish in a nature documentary. They were closing rapidly, periodically seeming to double back on themselves as the front ranks unleashed something and faded behind their friends. Every time it happened, the ship would buck and something would patter off the hull.
"They've got…" Chrysalis said, fighting for each breath. "Guns, railguns sort of. Not many shots, but enough to do some damage. They carry torpedoes, but they've thrown those out. Weren't supposed to kill us anyway, they… want us alive."
"Cache, up, up, they're right on top of your gun!" Sprite screamed, gripping the desk with white knuckles. "Kill it, kill it!"
On the screen, the perspective spun with a nauseating lurch, and the turret managed to catch one of them which was trying to hide in the shadow of a repulsor pad. You saw the shape of it just for a moment, a metal orb dotted with dozens of red eyes, trailing metal tentacles that waved in an invisible current. Then the shells intersected with its body and it vanished in a hail of steel and fire.
"They want to study us, learn how we got out, how we work in the Matrix, how we…" she said. "We can't let them take us, we can't…"
You tried to say "They won't" but what escaped your lips was a half-formed sob, drowned out by the rattle and thunder of the guns.
The sound of the guns lessened as, on-screen, one of the sentinels came close enough to unleash a hail of blue darts directly into it. Your mind only registered the snapping sounds of railgun darts smashing through metal seconds later, on some kind of delay.
"Upper gun is out, fuck! Vector!" Sprite called. The world lurched again as
Ashur rotated to bring the other gun to bear, loose objects clattering and raining around you. Another sentinel dove in, the guns along its abdomen strobing, and more sparks rained through the ship. Sprite leaned away from the screen to vomit. You held the lightning gun tight to your chest even as the heat of it started to burn your skin. Chrysalis slumped in her chair.
Your eyes were locked on the screen showing the dead gun. In the corner you could just see the swarm, such as it was, as the remaining tracers finally found purchase and tore a ragged hole through it. They were buzzing along the walls now, spread out, their weaving motions almost impossible to follow. Sprite's target tracker said there were eleven left.
"Chrysie!" Sprite said finally, wiping their mouth. "Go relink Cache's gun! Up in the catwalks!" Chrysalis was just staring dead ahead, muttering something. A prayer, maybe. Sprite smashed a hand against the desk in anger. "Chrysie, what the fuck are you waiting for?"
You looked back at her, then down. There was a dark stain along her leg, black in the emergency lightning, which terminated in the mangled remains of her boot. The front of her foot was still attached, but tenuously, clinging to a crescent of shattered flesh and bone and leather.
"Fuck!" Sprite called, snatching their headphones off. "Shit.
Shit! New girl, Coda, I…" They paused, their hands shaking, looking back and forth between their screens and Chrysalis. They were panicking, freezing up. On the screen, the red lights danced closer.
---
Three things need doing, and there are two of you. What do you do?
[ ] Take Sprite's place and call targets for Thrash.
[ ] Head up to the catwalk and relink Cache's gun.
[ ] Take over medical care and do what you can.
What do you tell Sprite to do?
[ ] Focus on calling targets.
[ ] Go relink the gun.
[ ] Take care of Chrysalis.
