"Go. Relink the gun, I'll take care of her," you said, unlatching your belt and pulling yourself to your feet. Sprite didn't move, at least not until your lightning gun hit the deck; the sound of it seemed to snap them out of their shock, and they bolted to their feet and raced for the ladder, forgetting to take their headset off. The wire snapped loose and trailed behind them.
You cast around the room for medical equipment and, right under one of the red emergency lights, saw a white diamond on a panel that seemed promising. You rose on shaking legs and staggered towards it, the swaying ship nearly sending you off your feet, and grabbed the latch. Inside was four small bags, and you grabbed one.
You knelt down by Chrysalis, the digital phantom memories of medical training playing rapidly through your brain. Inspect the wound; you brought up a small pen flashlight from the kit that flickered to life. It was bad; whatever had hit her had entered through her heel and turned most of her foot into a shattered ruin of meat and bone. There was no saving her foot, you just had to save her life.
Bleeding, stop the bleeding. You fished the tourniquet from the kit and wrapped it around; moving her leg made her scream and push ineffectually against your head, but she was so weak you barely felt it. You tapped the control and the tourniquet tightened automatically with a whirr of servos.
Painkillers next; maybe it should have been first, but you were working on a hazy autopilot. She whimpered, barely audible over the distant cacophony of the battle, but then she started to slump in her chair, trembling, spasming as shock took her. Her lightning gun crashed out of her grip and joined yours on the floor. You drew the small glass syringe from the kit, stuck it into her opposite thigh, and pulled the trigger. She jerked against the sensation, flopping forward, and you took her shoulder and pressed her back into her chair, close enough now she might be able to hear you over it all.
"I'm here, you're going to be okay," you assured her, taking her hand in your own. You just had to wait until the painkillers kicked in. She looked at you with unfocused eyes.
"I'm s… I don't want…" she mumbled, already slurring her speech. "Help…"
"You're going to be okay," you repeated. The last thing you thought she said was a small, desperate
no, then you had to pull away. Bandage what you could. Clean the wound, if you could. Reduce the chance of infection.
Somewhere above, you could just distantly hear a cry of triumph from Sprite and the return of a gun to action as you worked, flashlight in your teeth and blood on your hands. It felt impossibly distant, unreal, as false muscle memory took over and your brain shut off. You were never good with blood, you'd probably have passed out if this had happened before, now both your hands were soaked in it and you felt nothing.
Something crashed near your head, and you looked up to see Sprite sitting back down in the chair, grasping about for their headset.
"How we doing?" you asked. Their eyes danced across the screens.
"I count six. We're low on ammo for the underside turret, that last close pass was bad, but… See that?"
You looked; there was a single, large dot on the screen.
"What is it?"
"Hadraniel," they said, not elaborating, but the relief on their face was evident. "Help is on the way. How's is she?"
You moved to wipe the tears from around your eyes, hesitating only at the last minute as the smell of blood from your hands made you think better of it.
"She'll live. She's going to lose the foot," you said matter-of-factly. There was clanging along the roof, and you both looked up, expecting more sparks or damage. Nothing. Another of the sentinels blinked out, smashed to pieces on the gun camera as it tried to come around a corner of a pipe, the others peeling away. The spines and pads of the hull rippled in the shockwave.
The clanging continued. Something moved in the shadows of the external camera.
"The fuck is that?" Sprite asked, tabbing frantically. More external cameras, showing the much-reduced swarm regrouping for another push, the fires and scorch marks and ragged holes in the ship's hull, the metal and rock tearing past at impossible speeds…
And then stopping. Something was moving, near the roof turret, impossibly quickly and low between the tangle of components.
"Oh no, no no no, it must have-"
It pushed with liquid grace over and between the fins of a heat exchanger and turned back to the camera. A dozen red lights glowed as it swept over an external access door and latched itself in place. There was a glow from its underside, and a roar of tortured metal.
"Coda, the gun!"
There was a blinding flash, the same red as the emergency lights but a thousand times brighter. You were spared the worst of it because you were groping in the half-dark for your weapon, seeing only the reflection off the stained grating. You looked up as something moved across your vision in an impossible blur, simultaneously the grace of a deep-sea creature and the roaring, impossibly loud scream of factory machinery. You saw knives and saws and scalpels, fire and shrapnel, closing, too close. Right on top of you.
You raised the lightning gun to the terror and held both triggers. You didn't see what happened next, not exactly, as the arc welder's bright lance of blue light lept forth, but you thought you caught glimpses of the thing writhing and shrieking in the beam. The weapon ran dry, plunging the ship back into a deep darkness from your ruined night vision, but you saw the machine try to rise, turning its ruined body to bring you in the sight of its remaining eyes.
You pulled the triggers again.
---
Hadraniel was a battleship. It was not the largest, nor most advanced, of the ships in the Resistance Navy, but it was a terrifying sight none-the-less, a slab-sided brick of steel and ceramics which was easily six times the size of
Ashur, so large it almost scrapped the size of the tunnels. But it was armed, lined with dozens of rotary cannons and missile launchers, and you cheered as it barreled overhead on the external cameras and tore the machines to pieces with streams of metal and fire. Watching them try to run only to be torn to shreds was a kind of catharsis you'd never imagined you could feel.
After the last of them had shattered to pieces against the pipes, it deployed a crane with a large magnet and began fishing up the corpses, drifting back toward you like some kind of great whale. The lights snapped back on, and Sprite went to help the gunners get out of their seats. You turned Chrysalis over to Enigma when he emerged from engineering before collapsing nerveless against the wall, next to the fried remains of the Sentinel.
You saw your reflection a dozen times in the mirror-smooth glass of its dead eyes, and smiled weakly. In the funhouse mirror of the distorted lenses, a slight, bony, nearly-bald woman whose sunken cheeks and pale skin stared back; she looked straight out of an anti-drug PSA or something. You were soaked with blood, not just your hands but all down the front of your shirt and skirt and smeared haphazardly over parts of your face where you'd absentmindedly wiped.
Gingerly, you kicked one of the tentacles, and it rolled over lazily, the razor-sharp knives tipping it clanking against the grating. It didn't move.
"Nice try, asshole," you told it. It didn't respond. Cache came over and kicked it a few times, then sat next to you.
"I think it slipped by me while my gun was down," he admitted. "You get it?"
"Yeah," you said, gesturing to the lightning gun. He nodded, sighing, his breath unsteady. "That was me."
"Fucking hell, Coda, you're making us look bad," he said. You laughed, and, after a moment, leaned against his shoulder, desperate for the human contact. He wrapped an arm around you, and your heart rate finally slowed down.
"Sorry about earlier," you said quietly. He snorted back a laugh.
"Nevermind that. You're getting blood on my favourite shirt," he pointed out.
"It's your only shirt, dumbass," Vector muttered as he walked past, stepping over the corpse with just a brief look of disapproval toward you.
"Yeah. That's why it's my favourite," Cache said simply. "I imagine we're going to be lying low for a while; the Navy'll get destroyers up here to sweep these tunnels and find any sensor bases before we go back in. Might be a while."
"What about the codes?" you asked, and he shrugged.
"Chrysie will need help first, and it's too dangerous up here. We'll want to resupply, and… maybe pick up help for what we're doing next. Frag has plans."
Vector strode back, pausing to give the sentinel a kick, and to your surprise he joined the two of you on your patch of wall, sitting on the opposite side of Cache and kissing him.
"Good job, Coda," he said, the first positive thing you'd ever heard him say about you. "Cache… How's our ammo, honey?"
"We're almost out," he said. "You know where we're going?"
"Not yet. We're a bit far from everything," he said. Absently, he found something, a loose bolt or piece of metal, at threw it at the sentinel corpse. It bounced back and skipped off the metal floor.
"Where do you wanna go, Alice?" Cache asked.
"Uh, I don't exactly know the options…" you admitted.
---
[ ] Erebus, a manufacturing hub, Naval base, and the settlement closest to the surface. Its recyclers turn salvage and destroyed Machines into goods for the rest of the Resistance. A good place to upgrade the ship or get Navy help.
[ ] Shambhala, a hidden refuelling station and mine. It's small and secretive, but Page knows about it; it's a Disassembler stronghold and where a lot of their freed people end up. Makes it a decent place to recruit, if you're not too pushy about it.
[ ] Oasis, a base built into a small elevator which leads to the surface. Scouts used to use it to slip foot teams up to spy on the Machine; now its a Messanist base. Rumour has it they have a secure base that could be used to broadcast into the Matrix.
