My air support squadron was pinned down at the southeast corner of the facility by the overwhelming amount of kamikaze Zerg. On our Science vessel we'd already been hit multiple times, Several integral capacitors ruptured, and thrusters C7-16 had fallen due to a direct hit. I was organizing our engineers to the damage sites when another friendly Wraith went down.
Suddenly I perceive a flash of light in my peripheral, and feel heat as the detector monitor along the control panel to my left exploded, wind poring across my face. There was jarring shift in the thruster power causing me to be thrown against the wall behind me as the vessel dipped and that direction became downhill. I climbed back to the control panel and hit the Emergency Evacuation Override button, breaking the fragile glass cave covering it.Of course emergency override requires authentication, for in a emergency situation you have time to do such a thing. I thought as the console prompted me for the security code. My commander's voice picked up over the empty seat of where our communication special would usually be sitting. Ordering tactical withdrawal of my squadrons poticular front.
Great, so no rescue is coming for those of my crew who could get to escape pods. We had to traverse a conflict zone to get our rescuers. Because this ship is certainly in no shape to make it to the new front.
I ran down the corridor to the nearest armory where I found a handful of personnel scrambling for equipment. I got myself armed, regrettably no time for armor. I cuff a crewmate who was awkwardly trying to fit plates on his mesh. "No time, we need to run." I say, as I help him out of his tangled attempt at armoring up. Together we run for the nearest escape pod bay.
As I entered the launch platform, I watched an adjacent catwalk fall with a earsplitting squeal of metal taking men and women to the dirt far below the ship. My abdomen tightened with grisly determination. Eyes forward, focus on the next twenty meter. Three personnel followed in my wake as I approached pod E7. Five people ahead of me were working the preping procedure for ejection. The next thing I know they were swept away in a plume of fire as Zerg wrenched the pod from it's portal. That was the last of the E pods. We had to make it to sector D and hope those pods weren't gone by the time we got there.
Another jarring shift of the ship almost topples me over the rail of the launch platforms rail. The young man I had helped in the armory stabilized my balance, but not before I got a good look at the scene behind us. An Overlord Zerg troop transport had extended it's tentacles through one of the E portals, belching out scythe wielding zerglings. This sector of the ship was nearly empty, but there are still some personnel that had yet to get off. Like me and the three men following me. The Zerglings were definitely bad news.
What if there are no more pods? The safest place to be when this thing crashed would be either sector E or C. So as we moved into sector D and started finding empty portals of already launched pods, I began wondering if we still had time to get back to E.. That's when we ran into a seven man squad holding a three way intersection. Zerglings were coming from the split-off hallway.
I turned away from the main hall and got into a position to provide support for the frontliners just as a zergling breached our safety perimeter and slashed a man across the chest causing a gurgled scream as he fell back, blood splattering against the left wall and nearby two troopers. I moved forward keeping down and dragged the soldier back by the armored collar so that the med-specialist with me could have a look. While I moved back the man crouching to my right had his arm cleaved off which sent him sprawling against the wall screaming for a stimpack while his remaining arm grabbed for his pistol and started unloading down the hall into the face of the offending zergling. One of the people shooting over me paused only to hit the man with a stimpack. We immediately started pulling back into the intersection leaving him to be butchered as we blew away his murderers. Another of the frontliners was skewered through the chest and pinned onto the right side wall to be left hanging there, blood flowing steadily down his boots to the floor below and across the wall, due to the ship still being tilted.
The man whom I had pulled back to the med-specialist had already had his lung inflated by the medic to drain the blood out, and had been given a plati-tissue bandage over his wound. Though with just a glance I could tell it was grievous. He now looked me in the eyes and made for his rifle hanging off my shoulder, which I helped him retrieve. What his eyes told me was that he didn't have the energy to make it to the pod, but knew he could make the zerg fight for his life. He had already decided.
During a reprieve from the onslaught we started heading towards where the last D pods should be. But the wounded man ran out of breath and plopped himself down against the right side wall and propped his rifle up aiming the way we'd come. I put one of my two grenades in his lap and made to move on with the others. Before I could start he grabbed my hand leaving dogtags in my palm. I nodded.
Our destination ended up being pod D13's eerily empty launch pad that no one had prepped for ejection. Which we immediately changed. I heard gunfire followed by a explosion of a grenade from the direction we had come. I held my silence as anticipation filled the other's eyes. Two people prepping the pod, six digging in. Around twenty seconds later Zerglings filled the archway separating the main corridors from the launch catwalks, we open fired.
We only needed fifteen more seconds and we could drop. We held ten, then lost our vanguard over the edge of the catwalk. He was jumped on, killed it, jumped from his left thrown off-balance dropping his rifle to grip the sickle like appendages of the zergling, wrenched an arm off by pushing against its face with his boot while pulling its arms sending it over the edge. Another Zerg to his right was stabbed through the head by its fellows stolen sickle arm. The soldier then sprinted for the pod, but as a zergling stabbed into his backpack he was pulled to the side of the catwalk and rolled off the edge as he dodged another zergling's attack.
We dropped.
