Deep within the metallic grey bowels of the Alien base a certain Sergeant Major was once again cursing up a storm. Her rapidly formed Commando had managed to break out of the confining circle of sectoids but were now involved in a running battle that seemed to be going nowhere fast. Each corner they came to seemed to have a trio of alien soldiers waiting at it, all of whom had to be killed before the team could move on. The firefights gave other aliens the chance to catch up and so the whole cycle kept repeating. Despite the fact that the Earth force outclassed their opponents by leagues the constant pressure was starting to show and losses were starting to accumulate. Already a third of the team were lying dead along their path, weapons set to overload to preserve the technology.
Beside Laura another member of her team went down. He didn't even have time to scream before his head dissolved into superheated bubbling mush. Whatever these latest wave of guards were using it seemed to be cutting through even the latest Earth force armour with disturbing regularity. The aliens' accuracy however remained limited and the rest of the burst splashed harmlessly through the walls.
Laura peeled left, diving into cover and rolling to draw a bead on the latest assailant. Other than his distinctive purple and crystal weapon their seemed little out of place. He was the same midget grey git that X-Com had been killing for years, all head and no trousers. Laura lined up and gently squeezed off a return blast that tore a neat hole through the front of the alien's oversize cranium, and fractions of a second later blew its brains out the back in a pink and green spray. Much like the commando before it the sectiod folded at the knees and crumpled with barely a sound. Unfortunately unlike the Earth soldier, when he fell there were plenty more to replace him. Even as the viscous fluid stopped pumping from the ruins of its head two more drone soldiers arrived to take up the fight.
"Filthy Scunners!" she swore, firing off another stream of deadly missiles. Even before it happened she expected the empty chime to sound. Her third clip and with precious little progress towards the objective to show for it. Somewhere out there was the command bay and the alien brain, but wherever it was her commando didn't seem to be getting any closer.
"Ammo check" she called in the momentary lull. The answers were not good. The time was rapidly approaching when they would be forced to swap their Hybrid weapons for whatever they could get to work off of the bugs.
Her concerns were once more swept away, the aliens were once again rushing their positions, using their drones to soak up the commando's ammunition. Laura had already spotted the pattern and had enough respect for the bug-brain running the show to know that things were going to get a whole lot hotter when it ran out of cannon fodder. Somewhere out there the brain was holding back its best troops, just waiting for her team to flag. The moment the commando lost its momentum, lost its cohesion, or just lost its way then the brain would send in the heavy hitters.
Her display flashed again and they were once more on the move, forging down the featureless grey corridors, desperately searching for the way off the level, forcing their way through the alien defensive lines by sheer force of will and heavy ordinance.
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"Hot Damn!" Tomo swore. Her and Ranma had just met their first opposition. It had all come as a massive surprise to her, and even now she wasn't sure of all the details.
After Ranma used a utility line to haul their floating asses back onto the ship he had systematically beaten his way into the vessel through its own hull. That had dropped the into a depressurised spacer section where the outer skin was separated from the inner in a series of narrow strips all the way around the base.
From there the two of them had once again resorted to brute force and Ranma had turned his impressive sidearm into a door key. He had blown the plating to hell and she had patched the controls up enough to cycle the tiny airlock.
She had expected a phalanx of grinning aliens waiting for them the other side, and was more than a little relieved when they had found nothing but empty quiet corridors. The relief was not to last, instead the emptiness soon combined with Ranma's driven silence to unnerve her.
He had gone silent from the moment he had started hammering on the outer hull, and she had felt forced to follow suit. Even the crippling pain of the injuries he was carrying did not seem to be cause for noise as the veteran led the way with silent determination.
They had just come to yet another featureless corner when things changed. Seemingly out of nowhere a four bug patrol of aliens had appeared. They were Mutons, heavily armed elite soldiers of the alien empire, built like Ferro-Crete outhouses and sporting temperaments that would put hardened Neo-Nazi killers to shame.
Tomo had tried to raised her own weapon but by the time she had there was nobody to shoot at. Ranma had literally exploded from his careful gait and hurled himself bodily at the patrol. A rapid elbow to the chin drove one clear off his feet and into his comrades behind. A palm strike to the guts of another had driven him into a wall so hard that it never even felt its guts rupture. The final two were dispatched with vicious stamp-kicks, crushing their faces into their skulls.
It was a level of precise violence that Tomo would never have believed possible, let alone expected to see from a man sporting serious injuries.
"Ow!" was Ranma's only comment, before he fell into a loping run, weapon shouldered as he lead the way.
"Shit" Tomo swore and took after him at what to her was little less than a sprint.
Two minutes and three Mutons later they arrived at yet another featureless door, much like all the others that Ranma had ignored. Yet at this one he signalled a stop. He pointed two fingers at his faceplate and then gestured around the area. Tomo replied with a blank look.
"Stay. Watch. Shoot only at confirmed targets!" he ordered, then waited for her nod before disappearing through the door. The moment he was out of sight Tomo's brain seemed to fly into overdrive. Scared simply was not a strong enough word.
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He hated leaving Tomo outside but knew that this local command would get nasty and also that she wasn't reacting fast enough to stay alive let alone be of any real assistance. But he needed a break and this as the place to get it.
Ranma pelted through the door rifle leading. The room was just as he had expected, laid out just like every other small command centre he had ever seen. If the bugs weren't so damn predictable in their architecture things would have been a whole lot worse. A pir of large hexagonal consoles dominated the room, surrounded by four chairs and an array of screens. Six Muton command staff were variously arrayed around the room, now turning to face the sudden intrusion.
Ranma snapped off a quick spray into the nearest pair, high velocity eplosive bullets tearing through super hard skin like it was jelly. When the rounds detonated they tore flesh, tissue and bone into bloody gobbets and flung them across the room. However even as he bounded for cover across the room the others were raising weapons. Purple blasts of laser driven plasma replied to his assault, destroying screen, seat and wall with equal abandon.
Ranma popped up from behind a console, finger already squeezing the trigger. Two more Mutons went down, thrown from their feet, trailing pinkish mist as they bounced into the walls.
For once he wasn't fast enough, the Muton leader had been biding his time. Ranma's shoulder suddenly exploded into pain as a bright flare of purple energy blossomed across the plate and cooked the contents.
Deep within Zen-shin Ranma's warrior mind noted the latest disability and compensated. He flicked out a piece of shrapnel lying on the floor, using it to buy the time he needed to realign his sights. But the Muton was not as distracted as Ranma hoped and a second round hit the commando square in the chest. This time there was no pain, the suit stopped the shot dead, saving the commando's life. There was no third round as Ranma's answering burst destroyed the alien leader's head and weapon arm.
The final muton was an engineer, it too had been biding its time, but not for the same reasons as the leader. Instead the sole survivor was now already halfway out of the door, running as fast as its yellow legs could carry it. Unfortunately for it Tomo's fear had made her more than a little trigger-happy. No sooner had the door cycled than she was pointing her weapon at the opening way. Seeing a figure that wasn't Ranma's suit she squeezed the trigger and blew it straight to hell in a burst of fire that went right past overkill and into gratuitous waste of ammo.
When Tomo finally got up the courage to enter the now silent room she was greeted by the curious sight of Ranma once more stripping down out of his battle suit.
"Er Ranma?" she asked.
"Suit's U.S." he explained using the shortened version of unserviceable. "Purple guns have strong anti circuit effect." Tomo recoiled a little, digesting the new information. As Ranma moved over to one of the working consoles she went over and searched for one of these new guns.
She found one lying amongst the gore that had been a muton Technician. More disturbing than the pink fluids that the creature used in lieu of blood was he fact that even without the contents of its ruined skull the body still seemed to be trying to move and breathe, albeit through the sucking chest wound that was all that remained of its torso.
"Yuk!" she swore, gritting her teeth and recovering the weapon. A quick wipe later and she finally got to inspect the latest threat to Mankind. It had the familiar alien bulbous shapes but was otherwise very different indeed. Dual barrels and crystalline sights gave the entire weapon the look of something almost artistic. The fact that it was also completely lacking a trigger just served to make it look even more otherworldly.
"Moving!" Ranma ordered, leading the way once again but this time with still more purpose. The fact that his only protection now consisted of a somewhat damaged plugsuit seemed to have entirely slipped his mind. Tomo swore again and followed as fast as she could.
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"Fuck this!" Laura swore as her team was once more held up by yet another suicide sectiod team. "I am well and truly tired of this shit. All guns listen in!" she ordered, "we are changing the rules. I want an extended perimeter on me right now! Tyrone bring me the big buster!" Her orders caused more than a few raised eyebrows but the commando was too well trained to argue, and had too much respect for her not to trust whatever new plan she was hatching.
As the rest of the commando formed the defensive perimeter, taking up overwatch positions on all approaches Laura briefed Tyrone and her number two on the new plan. The trio were scorched and splattered with unidentifiable gore, tired but unbowed. Laura and Greg's weapons were giving off a heat haze from their barrels and Tyrone's looked like he had used it to batter a whole squad of sectiods into mulch, an observation that wasn't far from the truth.
"Every time we use their lifts some bastard is waiting for us the other end, so from now on we do it the old way. Big T I want you to blow us a hole through every ceiling between us and the command deck. Greg I want breaching teams ready to fly through those holes as fast as we can make them. If the aliens want us then they are going to have to play our game!"
As the other two moved off to start the new tactic something in Laura finally relaxed. This was the sort of thing she was good at, taking the fight to the enemy and forcing them to dance to an earthman's tune. She could already envisage the scene in the brain room as her team suddenly dropped off the scopes. The idea was more than a little comforting.
A little less than six feet away Private Patrick Star saw the smile and he too finally relaxed. This mission had been a nightmare for the young man from the moment they got into that coffin that they called an assault shuttle. As the team had forged its way through the corridors he had been expecting the shot with his name on it to arrive almost constantly. His leader's sudden change of tactics had almost caused him to lose bowel control, fearing that they were setting up for a last stand. Instead the boss lady was smiling and looking like the world suddenly made sense. He didn't need to know what the plan was, he didn't even need to know what the joke was, just the sight of that smile drove away the fear and at that moment he would have stormed the very gates of hell and still expected to walk out the other side.
Off to one side the massive detonation of the latest brand of fusion missile could be heard and once again the commando were moving. This time however the aliens would be the ones playing catchup.
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Outside the base things were not going well. Over half the interceptors launched from Nemesis were now either scrap or spiralling shrapnel. Every bay aboard the ship was crammed with damaged vessels being frantically jury-rigged to get them back into the battle. Worst of all the sickbay emergency room was overflowing into the corridors. Maimed and injured lay on anything that could be found moaning and groaning as they waited for medical help. Among the injured moved the doctors, nurses and orderlies, blood splattered wraiths dispensing quick fixes and painkillers, unable to keep up with the flow of human misery.
Misato pulled herself up from the cot that she lay in, clutching at her wounded head and side. With her unbandaged eye she quickly scanned the state of the med-deck and came to an instant decision.
"Doc" she called, dragging over an orderly busy dispensing painkillers, "give me a handful of those blue bastards."
"Ma'am?" he asked, unsure as to what exactly was going on.
"Looks like we can use all the help we can get, and I sure as hell ain't being much use here." Misato replied, lowering her feet to the floor. "Shit!" she swore as she stood.
"What is it?" the orderly asked.
"This damn floor s freezing!" she exclaimed, taking the pills in her good hand. "Now show me the way to the walking wounded!" she ordered.
On the Bridge Nabiki was still very much in control. To the other bridge crew, only trained in their current roles as backups for the real battle bridge, the captain seemed a fountain of calm and orderliness in a universe gone to pot. Whenever any of them started to get swamped by the information they were processing there Nabiki was, with a helping hand or an assistant to relieve the workload. Whenever any of the girls started to become despondent there was Nabiki with a timely word, or just a comforting grip on their shoulder.
The result was that even though the staff were operating in roles that they had never really been expected to fill they were operating like hardened veterans who had been running fleet actions all their lives. The biggest sign of this was the almost churchlike hush that had descended on the bridge. No unnecessary talk, each communication was short and to the point, going only to those that needed to know. Most of all there was no sign of panic and each station was operating with a professionalism that belied their backup status.
The truth was Nabiki was as close to her own version of Ranma's warrior's mind as she had ever been. All conscious thought had been submerged in favour of complete focus on the tasks that needed to be done. Those people that had seen her as the Ice Queen of Furinikan would have fled in terror of this latest manifestation.
Somewhere in her mind she registered that the casualty figures were more than losses to fighting efficiency, that the growing toll of pilots lost meant more than less interceptors to take the fight to the enemy, but out of sheer necessity that part of her mind had been bundled into a corner and gagged. Even the bright explosion of the Pacer carrying her husband had been filed away, partitioned off to be dealt with later when so many souls weren't counting on her.
"Tell engineering that I need those lateral shields up right now!" Nabiki ordered, knowing that soon they would have to turn to present a new aspect to the enemy if only so that they could give the turrets on that side time to cool. "And get me a sit rep from the marines!"
"Aye aye ma'am" came the reply and Nabiki moved on to a new problem.
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"Where are we now?" Tmo asked breathlessly. Keeping up with Ranma had become harder and harder. They had stopped for less than a minute when she had pointed out the growing stain on his leg where a random splinter of metal had caught him in a brief fight. He had merely taken the dermal stapler and driven six of the alloyed pins into the leg to seal the hole then started jogging again.
"Secondary power systems" Ranma reported, waiting for her to catch up.
"Ranma" Tomo started breathlessly "We can't... I can't... go on like this."
"Agreed! He replied, "Do what you can here" he said, handing her a couple of grenades he had lifted from the last patrol. As he jogged off he never looked back, but she had caught the understanding in that last look. Alone she was toast, and both of them knew it.
"Damn it all" she said, sucking in a ragged breath, "I'm a bloody engineer not some psycho commando who 'feels no pain'" she said, the last few words in a mocking macho voice. "What the hell am I going to do now?"
"Other than stop talking to myself, obviously" she joked, turning to the nearest door. It opened into a smallish room containing a few mutons and what looked suspiciously like a machine shop.
Tomo reacted on instinct. She flipped both the charges on the grenades, dropped them and stepped back to the side of the door. A desultory scattering of fire followed her, only to be suddenly cut off by a twin explosion. A twin explosion that as well as killing its occupants tore the walls off of the room and threw the engineer flat.
"Oops" she echoed, looking at the destruction about her.
The second door proved to be less dangerous but just as much use, a small cubby bare except for what passed for alien janitorial supplies. A brief thought crossed her mind that she had yet to see anything that passed for a toilet aboard the station. Her arrival at the third of the doors interrupted her musings. Readying her rifle she stepped into the detector's range and crouched ready for a firefight.
The door opened to a long chamber, dominated by the pulsating orange glow of the elerium reactors that lined the walls. Now here was something she could understand, engines!
A careful swipe with her utility torch and the door was locked behind her. As she turned to the reactors her face was fixed with a new determination.
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Deep within his Zen state Ranma moved onwards, moving from cover to cover down the empty corridors. He was well aware that time would be running out for the Human mothership and equally aware that given enough time the aliens could flood these corridors with enough troops to stop even a full X-Com commando, let alone one injured stray.
Academically he was also aware that leaving Tomo behind amounted to all but a death sentence for the engineer but it was hardly the first time he had been forced to make harsh decisions of that type. Either he succeeded and she stayed alive long enough to be rescued, or one of them failed in which case they would be dead and beyond caring.
Two suited mutons appeared in the corridor ahead, escorting a robed master alien. Like the others he had met in the corridors they were strangely slow to react. A fact that he exploited with two rapid bursts of automatic fire. The trio were thrown to the ground and splattered over the featureless walls before they even had a chance to raise their guard. However Ranma was well aware that the noise of even that short exchange would carry a long way down these corridors and it was only a matter of time before the alarm was raised properly. Then there would be no sleepy wanderers, instead he would be facing alien elites.
As he reached the penultimate door on his venture he paused. From the schematics he had checked in the last command centre what lay beyond was the beating heart of the facility. A star shaped set of galleries lined with the birthing pods of the next generation of alien invaders. At its centre would be the dome of the mother brain, accessible only from below and even then only through a well guarded liftroom.
He checked his ammo, and changed magazine anyway, there would probably be little chance to reload in the coming minutes and an empty rifle was a glorified club. He quickly dumped all his spare kit, anything that slowed him down now was a possible death sentence. All that remained on his rig was one spare clip and his stripped down medkit, even the knife was a luxury.
The plugsuit stayed, as did the salvaged helm from his suit. Neither would provide much protection in their damaged states but each was necessary in its own way. The thermal insulation of the suit would provide a few seconds of camouflage from the average robot. The Aegis helm from his suit was nearing critical battery level, but to leave it would be like sending up a flare in the middle of a disco. Even with the masking hood Ranma knew that only the efforts of Gos's team were keeping him protected, if only by providing a bigger target for the top psykers.
Ranma quickly fired up a final dose o stims from the kit, blanking out the pain and tiredness at the cost of exasperating his already damaged condition, and barrelled through the door.
To find nobody. Sure the walls contained rank after rank of sleeping, growing aliens, completely circling the walkways that led to the room below the glowing dome suspended in the structure's centre, but there was no sign of enemy presence. To say that he expected different would have been a massive understatement. Nevertheless he had little choice but to forge onwards, crossing onto the dangerously open walkway, rifle leading.
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Elsewhere the reason for Ranma's luck was paying the price of his easy approach. Laura's commando had reached the command deck by way of several busted floor-ceilings but the brain had anticipated the group's target. No sooner had her team begun moving through the support corridors than they had met the stiffest resistance yet. Everything from drones to armoured Muton elites were assaulting their positions, trading dozens of lives for the time it would take to rush the main response force up from the lower decks by the elevators.
To the tired soldiers of Laura's commando it felt like they had emerged into a horror film. Wave after wave of enemy charged their positions, often armed only with bunt objects, all attempting to get close enough to take down just one of their number. The tactics were worse than crude but terrifyingly effective. Laura's group, already whittled down by their torturous trek to the level were now losing soldiers with terrifying regularity.
"Three grey six" called one soldier over the coms, reporting the start of yet another wave.
"Dozen at two" called another commando from a nearly opposite position.
"Reapers at nine" called another and Laura ran to his assistance. The huge bipedal lizard-like aliens had prove remarkably durable, even with massive chunks missing out of their forms.
"Alpha nine running dry!" called yet another survivor.
"Alpha Ten assisting!" called his 'buddy,' as he tossed a half-empty reclaimed magazine that Alpha eleven would never need.
Laura knew things were desperate, but had just plain run out of options. It was stand, fight and die or run away and get hunted down. Faced with choices like that there was no choice, they would sell their lives as dearly as they could.
"And we were so damn close!" she griped, "Bloody bugs!"
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"I don't give a damn colonel!" Nabiki shouted down the coms, "You will get your men moving right now. I don't care if it isn't proper procedure! My husband and I spent a great deal of time working on the selection procedure and there is not one of them that isn't capable of initiative. Set them loose and do it now, or so help me I Will Tear You A New One! Kapish?"
"It is my considered opinion that in abandoning tried and tested procedure in a-"
"Zip IT! Follow orders or…." Nabiki slammed the close button, leaving the threat hanging. "Damn that Fuckwit!" she swore, cool having been finally shattered by the sheer idiocy of a man she should have been able to count on.
"Get me Medbay now!" Nabiki had heard the reports of her second in command's hobbling heroes and was pulling out her hole card. The simple fact was she had little choice. The last few minutes were proving to be the darkest ones of the mission to date. Roy's Flyboys and girls had succeeded admirably in crippling the assembled fleet, but had been rendered all but useless in the process. The Nemesis itself had taken such a pasting that even life support was being rerouted to shields. And now the aliens had boarded her.
Two minutes ago two alien ships had rammed into the side of the Earth ship and disgorged squad after squad of trained invaders. The chrysalid shock troops had quickly set about swelling their forces with new copies of themselves, gestated in the bodies of captured human sailors.
The worst part of the situation was that the Marine colonel seemed unwilling to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Nabiki was doing everything she could to slow the invaders down, from venting engine chambers into the corridors, to explosively decompressing whole sections of the ship. The Marine colonel on the other hand had insisted that he needed to retool his men for anti-incursion actions. Instead of the instant response she had every right to expect the damn man was insisting that he needed at least ten minutes to change armaments.
Right now Nabiki would have quite happily murdered him with her bare hands.
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