Suicide Charge into Hell
Strife26 of Bay12
((Abstract: Rufus's response to Meteor is faced with setbacks at every turn. A squad of Shinra's 2nd best attempts to deal with the seemingly inevitable apocalypse. Violence; Harsh language. Fits mostly within first game canon. Reviews requested.))
Chapter 1: Summation of Failure
Operation Atlas had not gone well. Andrew Roland lowered his binos. He wanted to open his mouth and declare it all to be hopeless. Stage two now looked liked it was about to go the way of stages one and three. What was the point anymore? But his job was a point all in it's own. Roland had his men . He couldn't show weakness in front of them, how could they fight if he lost it?
Brad Evanson stood to his right, a comforting bulk.. Brad wore a half-suit of power armor. The dull-olive weapon gave the Shinra soldier the ability to carry double the normal loadout of munitions as well as a heck of a nasty right cross. At the moment, he hefted the Faust pattern rocket launcher, with a full brace of reloads on his armored back. He turned his head and looked at Roland, "No problem boss, we did this once, no? Just like at Junon.
Roland raised the binoculars again, watching Diamond get ever closer, walking impossibly on the surface of the sea. A lot had happened in the past few days. He owed that bastard of a monster something too. Roland's thoughts wandered to the environment . . .
A deep breath of air. The familiar tang of Midgar's smog. As good a place to die as any, close to the slums he grew up in. Little light. The sun couldn't pierce the cloud of industry around the city. Red light. Meteor could. Ivan had rigged his artillery piece to serve as a speaker, he was playing some sort of electronic piece, strong, fast beat. Suitable for a club. The train in Roland's head moved to the Operation that they desperately tried to salvage.
Operation Atlas, formulated shortly after the North Crater incident, was a three stage plan. Step one was to destroy Meteor. Build the biggest bomb possible and put it on the last of the rockets. Fire it into Meteor and hope for the best. It seemed like something out of a late-night, low-budget movie.
The plan had collapsed in very short order. AVALANCHE had struck hard, wrecking a path of carnage through every recovery and security team to grab the Huge Materia that was to form the payload. They even infiltrated (if killing all the security and boarding it counted as infiltration) No. 26 and stole the Materia, defanging the best hope for killing Meteor.
The venerable rocket had still done a tremendous chunk of damage to it. Easily enough to be visible from the ground, with or without enhanced binoculars. For a few hopeful hours, the sciency types had theorized that Meteor had been hurt mortally and that it would break apart and burn up. The fucking thing decided to pull itself back together instead.
The final cost of Step One was immense. All of the Huge Materia was lost (and the odds of AVALANCHE doing anything useful with it was nearly zero, although everyone would be thrilled if they didn't decide to blow people up with it). Thirty members of Shinra security were dead, as well as several of the best bio- and robo- weapons. Shinra No. 26 had been the only real hope of striking Meteor, and it was irreplaceable. That wasn't stopping hurried efforts to cobble together No. 27 out of parts from the scrapped No. 13. It wouldn't finish in nearly enough time.
Part Two of Operation Atlas was to remove the barrier around the Northern Crater. It was the only part of Atlas that had had any measure of success. Sapphire WEAPON had attacked a bit too early. If it had waited just a dozen more hours, the Cannon would have been inoperable in preparation for it's movement to Midgar. With the Battle for the Cannon occurring when it did, the final score read one dead WEAPON and one damaged Junon Fortress. More blue armored uniforms tore apart and covered with gore.
From there, the Cannon was moved to Midgar and reconfigured as Sister Ray. All the power of mankind's greatest city, focused into destruction. It was nearly ready to fire, straight into the Northern Crater. Of course, it hadn't fired yet and the weapon was built in such a manner that it couldn't be aimed at the WEAPON that was methodically approaching.
In a perfect world, Stage Two's Sister Ray would be enough to destroy Sephiroth in his hole which would then destroy Meteor as its controller perished. No one was sure (or confident) that it would work like that though, so there was Stage Three. Shinra's best squad of troops would be in position outside of the Northern Crater. On the tails of the blast from Sister Ray and with Meteor destroyed by Stage One, they'd scale the Crater wall, then descend into the bowels of the planet. They'd find Sephiroth and fuck his shit up before he could go about doing something else nasty with all the energy at his command.
Eight soldiers: the bravest, the best, the toughest, and the sharpest. They had loaded up their equipment, the most advanced stuff available anywhere, and boarded the Gelinka-Bravo. There were two Gelinkas; Gelinka-Alpha was faster, using a secondary underbelly ramjet, but it was not an easy bird to land at the best of times. The decision was made to use Alpha to get the Huge Materia to Rocket Town, while the Stage Three Assault Team used Bravo to land outside of Icicle Inn.
Fate, the gods, or the planet had other ideas. While the Gelinka-Bravo was over the ocean, Diamond WEAPON blasted it out of the sky. It was lost with all hands and the attempts to recover the bodies and equipment were stymied by more monsters and AVALANCHE. Roland had known every man and woman on board, most of them were close friends.
The WEAPON responsible for their deaths was getting closer and closer. Andrew Roland and his troops would hold it off long enough for the Sister Ray to fire, even if it wouldn't make a difference in to the world's end.
((Hello. This is the immersion breaking and ever-unprofessional Author's note section, which is why I'm going to move this to the end of the last chapter whenever I get a new chapter posted. Firstly, we have the request for reviews, I'd really like them, okay? My writing isn't the best and needs any help that it can get, no? Secondly, we have the explanations. I decided that Shinra was going to have two examples of the Gelinka, this story actually started with me wondering how the Gelinka was crashed on the shoreline of the Middle Continent. I figured that it'd sense if there were actually two of 'em and the one that was carrying the Huge Materia to rocket town was the one that survived. That left the question of the second plane's ill-fated mission, which I turned into the Stage Three Assault Team.
Finally, we have the every semi-important question of an update schedule. At the moment, I'm actually writing this without internet access, due to my job. This job might make getting access difficult, but will hopefully give me enough time spent sitting around to write some more chapters. I'll probably settle on some kind of regular schedule, which I'll totally add right about here when I figure out what it is.
Thanks for reading this work-in-progress, I welcome any questions or comments about it.
-Strife
))