Thanks once again to all those who took time out of their homicidal ways to read and review the last chapter. I think I'll start with some replies this time.
Angel-of-lightness: Well its spread out over three days, but that's still 1/3 of a day. Anyway, why exactly did you sent questionnaires to thirteen odd people or however many it was? Like i told someone else, i am a nosey bastard and must know such things. Thanks for reviewing by the way.
Agent Josie: Fear not about it, but burn down the shed full of spiders and i shall be forced to deposit thousands of th beastly beasts on your doorstep. Then they'll probably run off in random directions, damn siders and their short attention spans, thanks for reviewing.
Tai Wilson: I think action is just easier to write. That's surprising, i would have thought it would be the other way round. Oh well, thanks for reviewing.
LiMiYa: Crazy is I indeed, thanks for noticing, and thanks for reviewing. I really have to eat something but i can't be bothered. Oh well.
Right, now for the chapter,
Chapter 29: It isn't over
We spent the next five or six hours looking around the Destiny for any nasty surprises that Neo might have left lying around. In the end, we found nothing.
"It doesn't make any sense." Said Dragon when we all met up in the bar, "why just leave a phone? Why not a nuclear warhead or something?"
"Maybe he's just trying to scare us." Hawk said in response. If her theory was correct, there was no sign of fear in her voice.
"Or let us know that he can kill us whenever he wants." This one came from me.
"In any case," Manticore's voice was calm and professional, and sounded like it should come from the body of a high ranking military officer of some description as opposed to that of a nineteen year old. I knew that he was over 400, but it still sounded; odd.
Anyway, as he was saying, "we can't stay here."
"Well where can we go?" Hydra was having a slightly harder time concealing her fear, "The Destiny is one of the safest and most secure places in the entire Matrix, if he can affect things here, imagine what he can do on the outside."
"But he'll have a harder time finding us on the outside." Responded Manticore. "Those sentinels outside were waiting for us, he assumed that we'd come back here. He'll have a harder time attacking us if he doesn't know where we are."
"Be that as it may," Dragon said whilst staring at the void on the ceiling as if sizing it up as a hiding place, "Where can we go?"
There was a moment's silence. We seemed to be well and truly stuck between a rock and a slightly larger rock. If we stayed in the Destiny, Neo could simply insert a nuclear warhead or some fancy killing device into the Destiny at some point in time and finish us that way. If we left, it would just take him slightly longer to kill us. But that was still slightly longer then we'd have otherwise.
"I know a pla…"
Hawk was cut off in mid word by a Godforsaken screech from loudspeakers that had appeared out of nowhere and were now resting on the walls. Three seconds later, they were gone.
"Fuck." Hydra's voice sounded somehow less surprised then her face seemed to suggest she was.
Dragon had explained the meaning of the alarm to me shortly after I ascended. We were under attack.
With that thought, and the sudden rush of fear that accompanied it, I felt a sudden rush from the floor that told me that the Destiny was rapidly moving into the sky.
My first thought was that the Destiny had torn itself from the ground and was flying to safety. Despite the tenseness of the situation, I couldn't help but grin at the faces of people who saw a tree flying past them. Then I remembered what Dragon had told me about external defences.
What had happened was that the Destiny had converted itself from a tree, to a disturbingly large, armed fortress amongst the other trees. Imagine what Minas Morgol would look like if it were made out of wood, that's pretty much how we looked.
The room around me changed from a post modern bar to a small, all black, circular room with five chairs, all illuminated by a faint light from the floor and all facing towards the centre.
I instinctively threw myself into the nearest chair and waited for what Dragon had described.
It didn't take long for the 'neural interface control circuitry, or the series of sharp thin metal spikes, to emerge from the arms of the chair and bury themselves inside my cranium. With a sudden splitting headache that was soon banished, and a surprisingly small amount of blood loss, I looked at the display that had appeared before me and got my first look at what was coming at us.
There were sentinels, hundreds, maybe thousands of the things, all flying towards us in what looked like a huge, blue tendril before separating into smaller tendrils and falling back into a larger one several feet behind where they stared, they were coming towards us, just very slowly. It seemed that they had been programmed for dramatic effect.
Below them were Demons, there were hundreds of them too, all carrying a firearm of some description. Some I could clearly see were armed with flamethrowers and rocket launchers; this didn't help my frame of mind much.
A green grid appeared across my line of vision, as well as numerous lists. I identified these as the weapon damage display, target information and neural link strength. There was also a green crosshair in the centre, and a crude radar in the in the top right corner. We were represented by a singly green dot in the centre; the enemy were smaller red dots which surrounded us. I was beginning to wish the Destiny had flown away.
The sentinels soon stopped pissing about and charged at us. They came at us in four huge lines, each of which contained probably thousands of sentinels apiece.
No one had to wait for the order to fire.
The Destiny's armaments were plentiful to say the least. According to a section of the damage display, I was controlling almost fifty ridiculously huge machine gun turrets; twenty equally huge rocket launcher turrets which I was later to learn were of Hawks' design, and fifty more of the electrical discharge cannons that the Destiny uses when it takes the form of a humble tree.
All these weapons covered a five centimetre radius around the crosshair on my screen, as a large red circle and a small caption informed me, I'm not sure how big it was outside, but I'm guessing it was bigger then five centimetres.
I took aim at the head of one of the lines of sentinels, inhaled sharply, and fired.
To be continued
Angel-of-lightness: Well its spread out over three days, but that's still 1/3 of a day. Anyway, why exactly did you sent questionnaires to thirteen odd people or however many it was? Like i told someone else, i am a nosey bastard and must know such things. Thanks for reviewing by the way.
Agent Josie: Fear not about it, but burn down the shed full of spiders and i shall be forced to deposit thousands of th beastly beasts on your doorstep. Then they'll probably run off in random directions, damn siders and their short attention spans, thanks for reviewing.
Tai Wilson: I think action is just easier to write. That's surprising, i would have thought it would be the other way round. Oh well, thanks for reviewing.
LiMiYa: Crazy is I indeed, thanks for noticing, and thanks for reviewing. I really have to eat something but i can't be bothered. Oh well.
Right, now for the chapter,
Chapter 29: It isn't over
We spent the next five or six hours looking around the Destiny for any nasty surprises that Neo might have left lying around. In the end, we found nothing.
"It doesn't make any sense." Said Dragon when we all met up in the bar, "why just leave a phone? Why not a nuclear warhead or something?"
"Maybe he's just trying to scare us." Hawk said in response. If her theory was correct, there was no sign of fear in her voice.
"Or let us know that he can kill us whenever he wants." This one came from me.
"In any case," Manticore's voice was calm and professional, and sounded like it should come from the body of a high ranking military officer of some description as opposed to that of a nineteen year old. I knew that he was over 400, but it still sounded; odd.
Anyway, as he was saying, "we can't stay here."
"Well where can we go?" Hydra was having a slightly harder time concealing her fear, "The Destiny is one of the safest and most secure places in the entire Matrix, if he can affect things here, imagine what he can do on the outside."
"But he'll have a harder time finding us on the outside." Responded Manticore. "Those sentinels outside were waiting for us, he assumed that we'd come back here. He'll have a harder time attacking us if he doesn't know where we are."
"Be that as it may," Dragon said whilst staring at the void on the ceiling as if sizing it up as a hiding place, "Where can we go?"
There was a moment's silence. We seemed to be well and truly stuck between a rock and a slightly larger rock. If we stayed in the Destiny, Neo could simply insert a nuclear warhead or some fancy killing device into the Destiny at some point in time and finish us that way. If we left, it would just take him slightly longer to kill us. But that was still slightly longer then we'd have otherwise.
"I know a pla…"
Hawk was cut off in mid word by a Godforsaken screech from loudspeakers that had appeared out of nowhere and were now resting on the walls. Three seconds later, they were gone.
"Fuck." Hydra's voice sounded somehow less surprised then her face seemed to suggest she was.
Dragon had explained the meaning of the alarm to me shortly after I ascended. We were under attack.
With that thought, and the sudden rush of fear that accompanied it, I felt a sudden rush from the floor that told me that the Destiny was rapidly moving into the sky.
My first thought was that the Destiny had torn itself from the ground and was flying to safety. Despite the tenseness of the situation, I couldn't help but grin at the faces of people who saw a tree flying past them. Then I remembered what Dragon had told me about external defences.
What had happened was that the Destiny had converted itself from a tree, to a disturbingly large, armed fortress amongst the other trees. Imagine what Minas Morgol would look like if it were made out of wood, that's pretty much how we looked.
The room around me changed from a post modern bar to a small, all black, circular room with five chairs, all illuminated by a faint light from the floor and all facing towards the centre.
I instinctively threw myself into the nearest chair and waited for what Dragon had described.
It didn't take long for the 'neural interface control circuitry, or the series of sharp thin metal spikes, to emerge from the arms of the chair and bury themselves inside my cranium. With a sudden splitting headache that was soon banished, and a surprisingly small amount of blood loss, I looked at the display that had appeared before me and got my first look at what was coming at us.
There were sentinels, hundreds, maybe thousands of the things, all flying towards us in what looked like a huge, blue tendril before separating into smaller tendrils and falling back into a larger one several feet behind where they stared, they were coming towards us, just very slowly. It seemed that they had been programmed for dramatic effect.
Below them were Demons, there were hundreds of them too, all carrying a firearm of some description. Some I could clearly see were armed with flamethrowers and rocket launchers; this didn't help my frame of mind much.
A green grid appeared across my line of vision, as well as numerous lists. I identified these as the weapon damage display, target information and neural link strength. There was also a green crosshair in the centre, and a crude radar in the in the top right corner. We were represented by a singly green dot in the centre; the enemy were smaller red dots which surrounded us. I was beginning to wish the Destiny had flown away.
The sentinels soon stopped pissing about and charged at us. They came at us in four huge lines, each of which contained probably thousands of sentinels apiece.
No one had to wait for the order to fire.
The Destiny's armaments were plentiful to say the least. According to a section of the damage display, I was controlling almost fifty ridiculously huge machine gun turrets; twenty equally huge rocket launcher turrets which I was later to learn were of Hawks' design, and fifty more of the electrical discharge cannons that the Destiny uses when it takes the form of a humble tree.
All these weapons covered a five centimetre radius around the crosshair on my screen, as a large red circle and a small caption informed me, I'm not sure how big it was outside, but I'm guessing it was bigger then five centimetres.
I took aim at the head of one of the lines of sentinels, inhaled sharply, and fired.
To be continued