(Pocky's POV)
If there was one thing Pocky had learned in her nineteen years of life, it was that character was revealed through adversity. Every experience, every wound endured, in those moments the worth of a person could be measured. And for her part, she was satisfied with the way her life has played out thus far. She had tried her best to live fully and without compromise.
So it was in this spirit, she had volunteered to recon the conversion chamber that lay above the reactor. The conversion chamber is where the power created by the fuel crystals heating water into steam was stored and amplified by a unique crystalline compound called Tetradin. The boosted power yield allowed the capital airship to use it's engines and weapon systems. A Conversion chamber's size was scaled in relation to the tonnage of the airship, and in the case of the Hellbender the chamber was pretty freaking huge.
The door that sealed the chamber was left wide open, allowing the Shalks to access it's warm confines and stuff it's interior full of eggs the size of scrumballs. But the queen was nowhere to be seen. The plan was simple, seal the conversion chamber, because if it was left open the entire ship would be flooded with lethal levels of ionizing radiation when the reactor was powered up. And while this would serve to eradicate the Shalk infestation, it would also kill off Rayner's entire team.
Unfortunately, the manual levers used to open and close the chamber were on the other side of the room, on top of the damned thing on a dangerously exposed platform. There were dozens of Shalks in the chamber between her and the objective, further complicating the mission. But Pocky was not a quitter, she would get the job done or die gloriously trying.
(Lucy-Lu's POV)
Lucy-Lu liked to consider herself an optimist, despite the many things she had endured up to this point; but it was times like this when she thought that the world was out to get her. When the walls of carefully constructed confidence and happy-go-lucky attitude crumble down to reveal the scared and tormented girl underneath. Usually the trigger for these states were problems she thought she had already recovered from.
"Lucy, why won't you play with me?"
"Go away... your not real!" Lucy-Lu cried out. She was ankle deep in the water, which was steadily rising. In front of her, down the other end of the hall was the monument of her greatest failure. He stood there, a blizzarian child no more than eight years old, his soggy fur was caked in mud, his dead eyes sunken and milky white, his once youthful features bloated and sagging.
"You can't run from the things you have done Lucy, you will never escape me," the phantom child croaked. Lucy-Lu backed away in fear as the phantom approached.
"I'm sorry Eddie! Please, don't do this!" She pleaded, hands held together. "I never meant ta hurt ya!"
"You watched me die, you watched me go under and you did nothing but cry; you were a useless friend."
"I canna' swim! I would'a died too!" Lucy defended, still backing away, horror clear in her eyes.
"How convenient for you," the vestige of Eddie-Ray rasped, "That does not absolve you of your sin. The true abomination isn't that I died Lucy, it is that you allowed it."
Lucy-Lu shook her head, tears were streaming from her eyes, "N-no! Your wrong! I loved ya like family Eddie, you have ta believe me!" She wailed.
"Love with limitations is not true love, Lucy."
Her rational mind knew that this was a hallucination of some sort, but it was getting increasingly harder to think straight. She could only vaguely recall her reason for being here, she knew that she was on the Hellbender, a derelict Cyclonian battlecruiser that was ideal for the needs of Rayner's currently unofficial squadron. She knew that the water around her ankles was an illusion conjured by her aquaphobia, especially considering the Hellbender's reservoir tanks had been vented during it's unplanned descent into the Wastelands, in a vain attempt to throw off ballast.
The best remedy for this situation would be to use a medicinal cleanser crystal to purge her body of whatever substance that had crawled into it. The sad thing was, she could not quite recall how to properly apply it, and the misapplication of such a powerful metaform crystal could prove life threatening, especially considering the fact that the one she owned was not optimized to her native physiology. Like a fool she had been counting on her naturally robust immune system to keep her safe, and had not invested in a fallback plan.
She tried to ignore the hallucinations, center herself on reality. Taking focus off the bloated, animate corpse of her childhood friend, she went through a mental exercise her mother had taught her.
"Inhaler, compter jusqu'à quatre, expirez... Inhaler, compter jusqu'à quatre, expirez..." she repeated the mantra in her mother's native Kwebuccer tongue, spacing her breaths evenly in an attempt to calm herself, slowly but surely she regained a modicum of reality.
"You will never escape..."
"Go away..." she growled. She could not allow herself to fall apart here, it would make her easy pickings for the Shalks, and she refused to become some ugly bug's midday meal.
(Gorman's POV)
During his tenure in the Cyclonian Army, Gorman had endured only the briefest of stays on warships of this classification. He was far more familiar with small escort carriers, but the premise of design was fundamentally similar. A mono-hulled layout reinforced by internal crossbracings, a simple and durable design philosophy that enabled the ship to withstand heavy shocks in combat. Through the green light of his vision enhancement goggles Gorman could see that the ship, while battered on the exterior, had received almost negligible structural damage.
The hunt for Lucy-Lu had taken them to the forward gunnery decks, which had received far less damage than the midship areas. This area housed the six macro sized blaster cannons that protruded from the bow. Ships like the Hellbender were used mainly to chase down enemy shipping and pulverize it's victims from afar, and were more accurate than the larger energy mortars aligned on the dorsal superstructure, whose purpose was mostly bent towards laying waste to the settlements of enemy terras.
"The air is cleaner here," Anju observed.
"The salvage crew must have opened the vents to the outside while they inspected the armament. Cyclonian capital weaponry sells big out here, so this place must have been the first area they checked out before the bugs started waking up," Gorman reasoned. It was no secret that when it came to military technology, Cyclonia was several steps ahead of the free Atmos. Only powerful and important terras like Atmosia had large capital ships in their defense militias. But that did not stop desperate kingdoms from creating their own battlecruiser sized warships from converted bulk freighters, and captured Cyclonian anti-ship blasters were among the most sought after components in the development of such defense projects.
"Good, it will make it easier to track Miss Furry and Crazy down," Anju remarked.
"How are you tracking her anyway?" Gorman asked.
"Scent mostly," she answered, "Lucy-Lu apparently uses a fragrant shampoo of some kind, it smells a lot like mint. And the Shalk blood has not completely covered it up."
"I don't smell nothing," Gorman replied.
"I'm a Sky Knight. Many of us train in different ways to sense threats, but it is very hard and only a few have enhanced more than one of the five senses, I chose smell because it is the most useful to trackers like myself. Rayner for instance has mastered touch, he can track someone through vibrations in the ground caused by their footsteps, although he is shit out of luck if it starts raining."
"So all it would take to mess him up is to whip out a drizzle crystal?" Gorman asked, suspicious, "If it is so easily defeated, why even bother?"
"In any other situation it is a useful thing to have, and unless you are facing someone experienced in this field such as the Dark Ace, one doesn't have too much to worry about someone canceling out the effect."
Gorman pondered this information. Sky Knights were a mystery to most inhabitants of the Atmos, including himself. They were capable of stunning acrobatics, agility, and had a connection to their Focus Weapons that seemingly defied reason. Lucy-Lu had once tried to explain to him how such things were possible, and he still could not understand half of what the girl said. In the end it didn't really matter, he was good at his job and did not need thoughts of the enigmatic qualities of crystals cluttering his straightforward mind.
Anju stopped and knelt down, taking a long sniff of air before speaking, "She was definitely here three minutes ago, we are getting very close."
"Then what are we waiting for? Lets go get her!" Gorman urged.
"Don't be stupid. We have already proven that running into bug infested airships unprepared is pretty fragging dumb, - all Rayner's fault for that – and doing so again with a psychologically unstable crystal mage could be our last mistake. We must be cautious."
Gorman frowned, he didn't want to believe that Lucy-Lu had the capacity to inflict harm on them. But the young woman was sick, and clearly not in a rational state of mind, she could be capable of anything at this point. "This deal is getting worse all the time."
"I know," replied Anju bitterly.
As a leader, Rayner had grown quite accustomed to second guessing himself. And looking in hindsight at his decisions up to this point, he had concluded that he had made a lot of mistakes. Heroically rushing into the unknown may have looked good in stories, but in reality it was pretty damn stupid. They had gone in blindly, without radios or protective equipment with a crude semblance of a plan. He had been taught better than this.
And now it was all riding on this insane gambit. He had no idea if Gorman and Anju had found Lucy-Lu and taken her from the ship, he did not know if Pocky was alive in the levels above him, or if she had already perished. It made him feel so damn helpless.
Darius looked similarly perturbed as he adjusted the massive reactor, his face awash in the ruddy red half-light cast by the crystalline fuel rods. There was no telling what would happen once the reactor came on line, there were so many ways this could go wrong. What little was left of the ship's tepid water supply had been shunted into the hulking condenser tank behind the steam generator which was linked to the reactor vessels. A Cyclonian battlecruiser had two reactors, which turned two conversion generators with the power of super pressurized steam. This process relied mostly on the glowing red fuel rods which provided the heat to transmute liquid to gas, and the cooling matrix that returned it to usable liquid state in the condenser, and only one reactor was in serviceable condition. Luckily they would only need one.
The Storm Hawks had sabotaged the starboard generator with a custom made gizmo of some kind, a device that Darius had flat out refused to try removing without understanding more about it. This made sense, Lightning Strike would not have made it that easy for the airship's crew to stabilize the ship, and it was all too possible that the device would do something they would not like if it was disturbed. This kind of thing was more Lucy-Lu's field of expertise than Darius', and she was currently unavailable. Stupid stinking insects.
Darius' voice brought him from his thoughts. "Well I've got some good news and some bad news."
"Good news first," Rayner's said, preparing himself for the worst.
"The good news is that the reactor is ready to be engaged. The bad news is that the capacitor circuits feeding the engines are closed and I have no way to open them from here; meaning that once we turn this on, the engines will start blasting off."
"Will it be enough to rip us from our anchoring?" Rayner asked alarmed.
"Not immediately, but we will be tossed around like a midget at the circus until we get them open. But if we do break loose there is nothing but cliff side, open sky, and a sheer drop into the Wastelands in front of us."
"Let me guess, the lifting system is not working." Rayner surmised grimly.
"Has to be restarted manually." Darius affirmed with a humorless expression. "On the brighter side, the air filters will cycle up automatically and the Shalk stench will dissipate. The intercom system will also be functional, so we can get in touch with the others."
The plan seemed to be getting more foolhardy and suicidal by the moment. But there was little options left, with the winter months settling in, sundown was not that far off. The Shalks would leave the ship and start killing people again. Either way, this needed to be ended.
"Where can we open the circuits?" Rayner asked.
"The obvious would be main engineering, but that place is crawling with soon to be very pissed off Shalks, then there is the damage control station located fore, and finally there is the bridge."
Rayner ran through what he knew of the layout of these ships. The bridge was closer to Reactor Control than the damage control station. But it was also mounted several levels above them, and there was no telling how many Shalks lay in between. Individually they were not a hassle, but a mass charge could be the death of them. They needed to have a better plan than running around blindly and hoping for the best, he was quite finished making that mistake.
"We will need a Plan B. If we can't cut off power to the engines, we are going to need buoyancy to stay aloft. Are you certain we can't fire the lift system up from the bridge?"
"Positive," Darius replied, "This battlecruiser is Block 0, and one of the greater known flaws was that control of the lift system was not slaved to the bridge, as is the case with more recent production lines."
"That's really frakking stupid." Rayner commented. "If we get out of this alive, that's the first thing we are changing."
"That is assuming if there is anything left of this stupid ship in the next hour or so." Darius said dryly. Despite his seeming disinterest, Rayner could tell by the subtle tremors in his hands that Darius was more than a little alarmed by this screwed up situation; although it could be the contaminated air taking effect.
"I don't plan on going down with a ship I haven't even payed for yet, Darius."
"Were you even planning at all?" Darius asked, his tone hardening.
"Not as much as I should have, I'll own that," Rayner replied, meeting his gaze, "But I learn from my mistakes, and this is one that will not be repeated."
"Don't misunderstand me Rayner, I know that all leaders can have a bad day; but this... this deal was a shady one to begin with, it would have been easier, for ourselves – and the people that work on this terra – to have tipped this deathtrap into the Wastelands and taken a normal carrier; the small kind that every sensible squadron uses."
Rayner scoffed, "The Imperial Fleet wiped those same 'sensible' Sky Knights out of the atmosphere during the war, conservatism isn't going to take the fight to Cyclonia, firepower will, and this ship is the only one we have found that has enough of it to make a difference!"
Darius leaned next the console he was working, arms crossed, "And what about the others? Lucy-Lu could be dead now for all we know, Gorman and Anju may be dead as well. I don't know what your beef is with your countrymen, but are the lives of our friends really worth it?"
Rayner tensed, fists clenched, "What do you want from me Darius? Do you want me to say that I am trash for not dropping everything to look for Lucy? I am not a Sky Knight at heart, don't you understand? I've seen too much to believe in the naïve stupidity of the Code! The best I can do now is get the job done and pick up as many pieces as I can afterward. Gorman, Lucy-Lu, and Anju are my friends, but what we are trying to accomplish is bigger than all of us, and death will always be a possibility."
"What are we trying to accomplish?" Darius demanded, throwing his arms up, "Revenge? That notion has no intrinsic value! Whatever profit to be gained is temporary, but the costs are permanent!"
Despite the anger he now felt, Rayner knew that Darius was right. But this was not about revenge entirely, this was about restoring the balance, something Cyclonia had lost. But my friends... Rayner had been taught that the lives of his comrades were secondary to the completion of the mission, but these were not ordinary people. The four people that came with him on this venture had one thing in common: loyalty.
For Rayner, loyalty was something that he valued the most, not to a country, but to oneself. Rayner's country had betrayed him, and he swore that he would correct that transgression; but now Darius had thrown in the insinuation that he may very well be the betrayer in this situation.
"Yes, Darius I want revenge," Rayner confirmed, "And so does Anju, Lucy's here because she feels she has nowhere else to go, Gorman's in it for the shits and giggles, Pocky is here because she is completely mental, and you are here to get rich."
"You speak as if that's a bad thing," Darius said crossing his arms, then he sighed, "You are not getting Her back Rayner, some people just don't come back from things like that."
"I didn't ask for your opinion on that matter!" Rayner snapped.
"But it seems as if you need to hear it! I'm not going to get myself killed on account of your demons Rayner!"
Rayner was about to fire off a blistering retort, before his vision flashed red and yellow, followed by a wave of diziness. Frack, the polluted air is taking effect! Falling to his knees he clutched his head with both hands, as if trying to keep his world from swaying.
"We are running out of time," Darius remarked, "Make your decision, Sky Knight."
A/N: Sorry for taking so long. Lucy-Lu is steadily losing her grip on reality. Anju and Gorman are catching up to her. Pocky is the only one having a good time. And Darius is having issues with Rayner's motives, and unpreparedness for this massive cluster-frack of a mission.