p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"They called me Raider, I like it. They also called me a terrorist, I don't like it as much. They are humanity at large, your Joe Six-Pack-O'Cheetos and Karen Lemme-Talk-To-The-Manager./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Normal folks, decent folks, but they don't know about the forty years I spent field testing nanosuit designs, collecting CephTech from conflict zones, they don't care, all that matters is that guys wearing my uniform did some fucked up shit in New York twenty years ago and now everyone wearing a Nanosuit is considered with the same dread as a faulty WMD./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"In any event, I'm a Ranger, used to be anyway, from the seventy fifth. Yeah, emthat/em good. Rangers ditched me after ten years of faithful service for breaking rules of engagement in Iraq, so C.E.L.L. took me on board and Hargreave recruited me into his Need-To-Know Alien research program. I'm thirty. I was twenty-nine when they put me in the suit. Been thirty for well over forty years now./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Now, I'm locked away in a cell have been since Hargreave died. I'm still fully suited; they would love for me to take the suit off, skin me like they did a lot of other users, but at this point the outer layers are no longer the suit, emI/em am the suit, is fused to my spine, replaced it in some places. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"People used to think the suit would, in time, replace all my internal wiring, but it's more clever than that, it knows having meat and metal working together gives me more options should the suit glitch out./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Still, human organs aren't efficient enough to the nanosuit's taste, so it passively improves everything, supplements my biological needs directly from sunlight, particles suspended in the air and the suit's on board power plant. At this point, I'm just a slice of meat with some bones stuck in a shell of living plastic which I can drive around but not control. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Gotta wonder if the Ceph weren't vertebrates with thoughts and a culture before they came up with this nanotech bullshit and improved themselves to the point of being mere jelly in exoskeletons. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"It's more than a suit. Pry away the shell, nanites in my blood, stored in my inactive digestive tract and freshly produced from hijacking my bone marrow will grow a fresh outer shell, often without the last model's design flaws. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"This suit keeps me from dying. Even brain damages are repaired given time, the very idea of falling sick is ridiculous, as this whole thing is a fucking bioweapon, and aging apparently isn't an issue when you're essentially a walking corpse in armor, in return, I keep em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"it/em from being destroyed. Even its software is backed up in my brain./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Hygiene is, however, still something the suit needs to work on; I've had a bit of Ceph tissue stuck in my knuckle covers for a month and those bastards won't give me a toothbrush to get it out. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I just woke up. Less than five seconds ago, I was offline. All these thoughts are nothing but self-diagnostic disguised as idle reminiscing. Five seconds is an eternity to a brain wired with a Quantum computer; I must not have slept well./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Across my cell's bio-steel bars, I see Vendetta drawing an elaborate tribal rose on the farthest wall of he own cage, using just her fingers./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Vendetta never had any talent for drawing, but her SECOND interface allows her to be skilled at whatever the fuck she wishes to be./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Female Nanosuits wearers look nothing like males, mirroring the different morphologies; they have a bit more Coltan-Titanium protecting the chest area and thinner CryFibril strands. This manifest as slight differences in performance that were never worth noting in my opinion, although I guess the additional hard plates help protect them from impacts while the thinner muscles increase mobility./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"PHS women lack mass, but have superior quick-twitch muscle fibers./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Ven is just one of many C.E.L.L. operatives that came along when I surrendered. I wanted to help fight the Ceph, but was locked in here with my surviving Battalion./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Six hundred of us are left, all stuck in this prison floating in high orbit./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"The space station used to be an experimental base for the Marine Corps' own PHSs, but after the war, it turned to just a place to lock up anyone with Nanosuits and not U.S. Military; that means British, North Korean, Chinese, Russian, French and Israeli Post-Human Soldiers populate this thing, not all locked up, but effectively prisoners like me./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"We're too dangerous to be let free, too powerful to be controlled and to well known by civvies to be executed. Even then, trying to kill all five hundred thousand PHSs here would basically be the last mistake any army would make./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Yeah, emthat /emmany. The space station is huge, but even then, it wasn't meant to house that number of residents and has shown signs of falling apart recently; lights going down without explanation and coming back up after days, water running out for days on end –still out now- guards discussing how fucked they are in the security booth, two hundred meters to the right./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I hear them loud and clear, right now, despite their conviction of the contrary. They're not exactly wrong to believe I am oblivious; I used Ceph Nano-Catalysts and scans of Prophet's suit to improve my armor while theirs are vanilla models…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"From what I understand, we 'Drifted'; one moment we were above Earth and about to be attacked by a massive Ceph ship, the next everyone's suit shuts down, knocking them out in the process, then we're in deep space, sending out distress signals and praying to shit someone comes check, even the Ceph. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"That's why I feel so groggy; suit put me in stasis./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;""Chief, you good?" Ven speaks, not looking back from her drawing, now spanning the whole wall and featuring elegant swirls and thorns. She was blinded by a tactical nuke in Japan and her suit compensated with some creepy shit RADAR/LADAR/SONAR sense that replace visual input. She says it's like standing in a room with a thousand mirrors all pointed at her; confusing at first, but once she became used to it, it gave her full 360 vision over short distances and long range 3d vision/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;""Yeah, all good." I reply, sitting down on my bed, "Thirsty."/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"She nods, "Hear you on that."/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Conversation's over. We're not very talkative, odd, seeing as we served in Kuwait together, though she was with the Canadian Forces. She taught me the meaning of the sentence "Us, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, have done so much for so long with so little, we can now do anything with nothing." She's still the best damn LAV commander I ever met, and she knows that./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"This isn't as boring as you'd think, I have internet access in my suit, can talk to every single PHS in the station whenever I want to, have every good span style="mso-spacerun: yes;" /spanvideo game ever produced installed in my suit along with DLCs and collectors editions and have over a two hundred hours of porn saved./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Porn doesn't have the same appeal it used to, I can appreciate naked human beings for their aesthetic and such, but feel no sexual impulses or desire. You'd think that would change a lot of things, but it didn't, really, I just use the time I spent jerking off doing constructive shit./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Granted, constructive shit has revolved around reading books ever since I got locked up, something few people expect from grunts. That and initiative…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Might as well see what's going on: I open the Quantum Resonance… Thing… Yeah, look I've got no clue what it is, I just know it came from the Russians, used a tiny bit of my Catalyst reserves and allowed me to send instant text messages to everyone wearing a Nanosuit no matter where they are./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Raider: Yo, what's the news everyone?/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"It just appears as a small line of text at the bottom of their HUDs, but most of them are probably bored to shit and as much as they hate me, this line is going to bug them until someone replies./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Two new lines pop at about the same time on my HUD:/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Nomad: Piss off./span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Uriel: They see me Raidin'.../span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Charming. Nomad doesn't usually have much of a beef with me, we played poker online together until recently and both decided what happened in NYC was a massive clusterfuck for everyone involved and to just leave it at that. No clue who Uriel is./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Psycho: Guys, knock it off! Unknown, Raid, yanks are busy unfucking this mess/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Psycho… Man got skinned out of his Mk.1 nanosuit, then raided the CryNet stores and got himself a Mk.3… Just in time to be tossed in here with the rest of us./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Hitman: I am talking things over with the Marines./span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Hitman: To get you and your men released. The situation has evolved./span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"That's not good. Well, anything's better than being locked up in this shit hole, but if they need my boys, then something bad is going on./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Ven's caught on to the exchange and is stepping away from her drawing, before leaning her back on the cell door. No more messages pop up. That's odd when there's half a million men and women listening in. In fact, most of the time I have SECOND filter unwanted texts; everyone's awfully quiet today…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I wait. Fifteen minutes later, still nothing, but the station gets shaken by what is unmistakably an explosion. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Raider: Problems?/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Nomad: HOSTILES. NOT XENOXEPH!/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Fuck the marines, I'm not waiting for them to get their heads out of their asses just to end up with a probe in mine. "All sections," I speak in by Brigade's com channel, "form up at the third deck armory, gear up and wait for instructions." I walk up to the door… -strongMaximum Strength- /strong…stronga/strongnd rip it off its hinges in one pull. A thunderstorm of groaning metal, akin to someone scratching their nails on a black board, follows soon after as six hundred C.E.L.L. PHS bust through reinforced titanium doors like they're made of paper. A few priority video feeds show the Korean People's Army boys doing the same and just following my troops around. I send a request to their General, asking that we share tactical data and cooperate should things go bad./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"The answer comes in the form of a massive influx of data to my SECOND interface. Seventy thousand soldiers; the Chinese are cooperating with them as well, even though they weren't locked up./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Never seen the Chinese Nanosuits… Wonder if they have Made In China stamped all over…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Outside my cell, I am met with a hundred C.E.L.L. or so. Whole block was dedicated to us, it seems./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I nod to the right side of the hall and we make our way past about fifty cells, already empty, the occupants far ahead, from the looks of it./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"The two U.S. Marines guarding the cell block don't bother to leave their station and actually open the door for us, information that I pass along to other officers./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"They must tell their men not to cause trouble, because the whole prison break goes smoothly. Mako, one of my greenest recruits, actually asks a Marine for direction to the armory. He gets an answer./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Everyone on the station is done. This was a FUBAR deal when they were stuck in orbit, now it's beyond that. We're being attacked, now it's us vs them./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Busting out of our cells broke something. Orders, flags, friends, paycheck, all of these seem pretty pointless now, we're never getting back into the real world. We're all in this shit together./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"We're all past the point of no bullshit,span style="mso-spacerun: yes;" /spanand with twice the manpower of the U.S. Marine Corps, all clad in top notch bio-mechanical combat gear, those tangos will learn today./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Normal folks, decent folks, but they don't know about the forty years I spent field testing nanosuit designs, collecting CephTech from conflict zones, they don't care, all that matters is that guys wearing my uniform did some fucked up shit in New York twenty years ago and now everyone wearing a Nanosuit is considered with the same dread as a faulty WMD./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"In any event, I'm a Ranger, used to be anyway, from the seventy fifth. Yeah, emthat/em good. Rangers ditched me after ten years of faithful service for breaking rules of engagement in Iraq, so C.E.L.L. took me on board and Hargreave recruited me into his Need-To-Know Alien research program. I'm thirty. I was twenty-nine when they put me in the suit. Been thirty for well over forty years now./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Now, I'm locked away in a cell have been since Hargreave died. I'm still fully suited; they would love for me to take the suit off, skin me like they did a lot of other users, but at this point the outer layers are no longer the suit, emI/em am the suit, is fused to my spine, replaced it in some places. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"People used to think the suit would, in time, replace all my internal wiring, but it's more clever than that, it knows having meat and metal working together gives me more options should the suit glitch out./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Still, human organs aren't efficient enough to the nanosuit's taste, so it passively improves everything, supplements my biological needs directly from sunlight, particles suspended in the air and the suit's on board power plant. At this point, I'm just a slice of meat with some bones stuck in a shell of living plastic which I can drive around but not control. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Gotta wonder if the Ceph weren't vertebrates with thoughts and a culture before they came up with this nanotech bullshit and improved themselves to the point of being mere jelly in exoskeletons. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"It's more than a suit. Pry away the shell, nanites in my blood, stored in my inactive digestive tract and freshly produced from hijacking my bone marrow will grow a fresh outer shell, often without the last model's design flaws. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"This suit keeps me from dying. Even brain damages are repaired given time, the very idea of falling sick is ridiculous, as this whole thing is a fucking bioweapon, and aging apparently isn't an issue when you're essentially a walking corpse in armor, in return, I keep em style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"it/em from being destroyed. Even its software is backed up in my brain./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Hygiene is, however, still something the suit needs to work on; I've had a bit of Ceph tissue stuck in my knuckle covers for a month and those bastards won't give me a toothbrush to get it out. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I just woke up. Less than five seconds ago, I was offline. All these thoughts are nothing but self-diagnostic disguised as idle reminiscing. Five seconds is an eternity to a brain wired with a Quantum computer; I must not have slept well./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Across my cell's bio-steel bars, I see Vendetta drawing an elaborate tribal rose on the farthest wall of he own cage, using just her fingers./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Vendetta never had any talent for drawing, but her SECOND interface allows her to be skilled at whatever the fuck she wishes to be./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Female Nanosuits wearers look nothing like males, mirroring the different morphologies; they have a bit more Coltan-Titanium protecting the chest area and thinner CryFibril strands. This manifest as slight differences in performance that were never worth noting in my opinion, although I guess the additional hard plates help protect them from impacts while the thinner muscles increase mobility./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"PHS women lack mass, but have superior quick-twitch muscle fibers./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Ven is just one of many C.E.L.L. operatives that came along when I surrendered. I wanted to help fight the Ceph, but was locked in here with my surviving Battalion./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Six hundred of us are left, all stuck in this prison floating in high orbit./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"The space station used to be an experimental base for the Marine Corps' own PHSs, but after the war, it turned to just a place to lock up anyone with Nanosuits and not U.S. Military; that means British, North Korean, Chinese, Russian, French and Israeli Post-Human Soldiers populate this thing, not all locked up, but effectively prisoners like me./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"We're too dangerous to be let free, too powerful to be controlled and to well known by civvies to be executed. Even then, trying to kill all five hundred thousand PHSs here would basically be the last mistake any army would make./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Yeah, emthat /emmany. The space station is huge, but even then, it wasn't meant to house that number of residents and has shown signs of falling apart recently; lights going down without explanation and coming back up after days, water running out for days on end –still out now- guards discussing how fucked they are in the security booth, two hundred meters to the right./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I hear them loud and clear, right now, despite their conviction of the contrary. They're not exactly wrong to believe I am oblivious; I used Ceph Nano-Catalysts and scans of Prophet's suit to improve my armor while theirs are vanilla models…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"From what I understand, we 'Drifted'; one moment we were above Earth and about to be attacked by a massive Ceph ship, the next everyone's suit shuts down, knocking them out in the process, then we're in deep space, sending out distress signals and praying to shit someone comes check, even the Ceph. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"That's why I feel so groggy; suit put me in stasis./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;""Chief, you good?" Ven speaks, not looking back from her drawing, now spanning the whole wall and featuring elegant swirls and thorns. She was blinded by a tactical nuke in Japan and her suit compensated with some creepy shit RADAR/LADAR/SONAR sense that replace visual input. She says it's like standing in a room with a thousand mirrors all pointed at her; confusing at first, but once she became used to it, it gave her full 360 vision over short distances and long range 3d vision/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;""Yeah, all good." I reply, sitting down on my bed, "Thirsty."/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"She nods, "Hear you on that."/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Conversation's over. We're not very talkative, odd, seeing as we served in Kuwait together, though she was with the Canadian Forces. She taught me the meaning of the sentence "Us, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, have done so much for so long with so little, we can now do anything with nothing." She's still the best damn LAV commander I ever met, and she knows that./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"This isn't as boring as you'd think, I have internet access in my suit, can talk to every single PHS in the station whenever I want to, have every good span style="mso-spacerun: yes;" /spanvideo game ever produced installed in my suit along with DLCs and collectors editions and have over a two hundred hours of porn saved./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Porn doesn't have the same appeal it used to, I can appreciate naked human beings for their aesthetic and such, but feel no sexual impulses or desire. You'd think that would change a lot of things, but it didn't, really, I just use the time I spent jerking off doing constructive shit./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Granted, constructive shit has revolved around reading books ever since I got locked up, something few people expect from grunts. That and initiative…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Might as well see what's going on: I open the Quantum Resonance… Thing… Yeah, look I've got no clue what it is, I just know it came from the Russians, used a tiny bit of my Catalyst reserves and allowed me to send instant text messages to everyone wearing a Nanosuit no matter where they are./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Raider: Yo, what's the news everyone?/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"It just appears as a small line of text at the bottom of their HUDs, but most of them are probably bored to shit and as much as they hate me, this line is going to bug them until someone replies./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Two new lines pop at about the same time on my HUD:/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Nomad: Piss off./span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Uriel: They see me Raidin'.../span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Charming. Nomad doesn't usually have much of a beef with me, we played poker online together until recently and both decided what happened in NYC was a massive clusterfuck for everyone involved and to just leave it at that. No clue who Uriel is./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Psycho: Guys, knock it off! Unknown, Raid, yanks are busy unfucking this mess/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Psycho… Man got skinned out of his Mk.1 nanosuit, then raided the CryNet stores and got himself a Mk.3… Just in time to be tossed in here with the rest of us./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Hitman: I am talking things over with the Marines./span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Hitman: To get you and your men released. The situation has evolved./span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"That's not good. Well, anything's better than being locked up in this shit hole, but if they need my boys, then something bad is going on./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Ven's caught on to the exchange and is stepping away from her drawing, before leaning her back on the cell door. No more messages pop up. That's odd when there's half a million men and women listening in. In fact, most of the time I have SECOND filter unwanted texts; everyone's awfully quiet today…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I wait. Fifteen minutes later, still nothing, but the station gets shaken by what is unmistakably an explosion. /span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Raider: Problems?/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"emspan style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Nomad: HOSTILES. NOT XENOXEPH!/span/em/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Fuck the marines, I'm not waiting for them to get their heads out of their asses just to end up with a probe in mine. "All sections," I speak in by Brigade's com channel, "form up at the third deck armory, gear up and wait for instructions." I walk up to the door… -strongMaximum Strength- /strong…stronga/strongnd rip it off its hinges in one pull. A thunderstorm of groaning metal, akin to someone scratching their nails on a black board, follows soon after as six hundred C.E.L.L. PHS bust through reinforced titanium doors like they're made of paper. A few priority video feeds show the Korean People's Army boys doing the same and just following my troops around. I send a request to their General, asking that we share tactical data and cooperate should things go bad./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"The answer comes in the form of a massive influx of data to my SECOND interface. Seventy thousand soldiers; the Chinese are cooperating with them as well, even though they weren't locked up./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Never seen the Chinese Nanosuits… Wonder if they have Made In China stamped all over…/span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Outside my cell, I am met with a hundred C.E.L.L. or so. Whole block was dedicated to us, it seems./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"I nod to the right side of the hall and we make our way past about fifty cells, already empty, the occupants far ahead, from the looks of it./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"The two U.S. Marines guarding the cell block don't bother to leave their station and actually open the door for us, information that I pass along to other officers./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"They must tell their men not to cause trouble, because the whole prison break goes smoothly. Mako, one of my greenest recruits, actually asks a Marine for direction to the armory. He gets an answer./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Everyone on the station is done. This was a FUBAR deal when they were stuck in orbit, now it's beyond that. We're being attacked, now it's us vs them./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"Busting out of our cells broke something. Orders, flags, friends, paycheck, all of these seem pretty pointless now, we're never getting back into the real world. We're all in this shit together./span/p
p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; line-height: normal;"span style="font-size: 13.5pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; color: black; mso-fareast-language: EN-CA;"We're all past the point of no bullshit,span style="mso-spacerun: yes;" /spanand with twice the manpower of the U.S. Marine Corps, all clad in top notch bio-mechanical combat gear, those tangos will learn today./span/p