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Patwardhan stands back, as Gonzales moves abreast of Booths. The two
of them lay down an impenetrable barrier with their pulse rifles,
Gonzo cringing and firing at random, while with unnatural calm PFC
Booths takes his time, hitting his targets in the crook of the neck,
or splitting them apart at the waist, that sometimes seems to work.
He quickly dismembers two aliens while sweeping left to right, and
finishes them off on the return. Gonzo nails one ceiling-crawler,
first taking off its hands at the wrists. Upon hitting the ground, he
dumps a long burst into the thing's torso, leaving only a smoking
corpse, slowly sinking through the deck grating.
As Patwardhan falls back, kicking one of the trauma team members in
the ass, Healy pushes her way toward the umbilicus seal. She spots
Leifer's immobile form in the shadows off to her right-- Rookie
dumbass! Jay Stewards slams into her, shotgun in hand, nearly blows
both their f-cking heads off! Healy shoves him out of the way, just
as he begins to mumble, "Oh sergeant, oh sergeant, can you believe
this?" The umbilicus looks clear. Cops at the opposite end
shouting, "Come on! Healy! Run! Get out of there!"
Patwardhan grabs him and follows Healy up the umbilicus, careful not
to move too quickly. Gravitic effects while moving down the narrow
hall are strange, so you have to hang on to the little handgrips
provided. It's only 20m, but it seems impossibly slow going.
"Wait!" hails one of her fellow officers from the Rodina-end of the
umbilicus, using the 'talkie. "Healy, we can't seal it from this end!
Somebody has to key the cycle or it'll take us two or three minutes
to -- goddamn gunshots -- too long to--" But she's got the point.
The shell-shocked cops Booths and Gonzales had been firing to protect
have gotten to their feet behind the riflemen, and are stumbling out
of the room after the meds, Patwardhan, and Healy. Leaving two pulse
rifles against a wall of aliens. For each one they shoot down,
another takes its place, a meter or two closer by the time they can
adjust their fire. One of the aliens gets crossed in their lines at
once: in a spray of yellow acid, the thing is cut in pieces, its jaw
shattering into translucent fragments.
The lights begin to fade from the cool-blue low energy mode to a dull
strobing red as emergency backups are initiated. That means something
major just got cut on this deck. The sunken pits where once there
were steaming dead aliens is tell-tale enough. Forced to take a few
steps back toward the Gaines-side seal, the two soldiers find they're
quickly running out of room, and it's almost impossible to see what
they're shooting at.
The auto-seal procedure to lock both sides of the umbilicus will take a couple of minutes, but it's their only
option, since Rodina actually has to establish a connection with
the Gaines to tell it to remotely seal its umbilicus door. The only
way to seal the umbilicus quicker requires somebody to stay back
until everyone's clear, then manually type in the start sequence from
the control panel on the Gaines-side lock.
Healy waves for the cops in the Rodina side airlock to go back
through the inner door as she runs unsteadily up the umbilical.
Not expecting a response, Booths, goes down into the rifleman's
crouch once more. His thumb has already clicked the selector to
grenade again.
"FIRE IN THE HOLE!"
Thump. Thump.
His head down, helmet turned towards the aliens' advance, Booths
smiles. Two grenades. Thumb flicks up, and rifle is back on full
auto.
He depresses the trigger, and lets fly into the mess. Not the same as
the 'Bitch', but it'll do.
"Civilians to the rear!" Patwardhan shouts to the donut munchers and
medical staff, waving her incinerator in a manner that subtly
indicates that she isn't just giving a suggestion or asking for
opinions on the matter.
For the aliens, being packed cheek to jowl is an advantage, but
herself and her fellow marines... they need room to work. Non-combat
trained civies will only be speed bumps.
Knocking any remaining cops out of the way with none-too-gentle
swings of her incinerator's hot muzzle, she moves into a position
where she can support Booths and Gonzales in what she knows will be
their eventual withdrawl.
The cargo handler risked a split-second glance to the Marine beside
him. "Yes, actually," he said. " I do want to live forever."
He then began to inch back towards the umbilicus opening, a process
that was sped up by the firing of a couple of grendes from Booth's
rifle, and just because, he decided to contribute one of his own, his
rifle angled up just a bit to try and stem the flow from behind where
the front-most Aliens were.
He settled into a standing rifleman's position after firing and spat
bursts into the crowd, ever inching backwards slightly.
Healy has no idea how effective a marine frontal attack can be in
such tight quarters. In her mind's eye, it's a tangle of fire, limber
black limbs and jaws working, human faces twisted into a deathly
rictus: on Private Booths and Gonzo, not the cops under the forklift.
That's another image she'd like to erase from her memory.
She races up the flexible hallway with a medtech clawing at the back
of her uniform, moving away from the overblown musical chatter of
pulse rifles, away from the ungodly screeching of those creatures,
toward the solid warm comfort of Rodina. What she wouldn't give for a
whiff of some of that mingled sweat-smell that permeates the place.
At least, there's a part of her that still feels secure when she
thinks of the quiet humming corridors of the station. She recalls a
conversation she had earlier in the day with Burnett. He was so f-
cking confident. "Whatever those jarheads ran into out there," he was
saying. "They probably went into it half-assed. You know, marines.
They brought a jackhammer to do the work of a scalpel, and you know
it..." After seeing his mindless abandonment of the situation
earlier, she wouldn't trust him to locate his own ass with any
accuracy.
As if at the end of a bad dream, she reaches the Rodina airlock
chamber, greeted by too many helpful hands, too many questions fired
off at once. "Leifer, Kaohn, Anderson, what happened, are you
alright?" She'd been yelling at them to get back, out of airlock, out
of the way for the emergency airlock purge. No one was there to
orchestrate the second squad, and they just waited there, useless and
screaming. Marshall Burnett lost it. Totally bonkers. Leifer... god
damn. Now she's in charge of these monkeys.
The meds stumble into the room behind her, followed by the wild-eyed
cops. Meeting their crazed looks, seeing the blood on their hands and
faces from the incredible carnage caused by the android, makes her
stomach roil. Then it clenches as the last officer pushes his way out
of the umbilicus, hell-bent on reaching the Rodina, and maybe beyond.
Three rapid explosions roll across the open tube, powerful blasts
that can be felt all the way over here. Where's Patwardhan?
With her palm hovering over the flat red EMERGENCY
PRESSURIZATION/RELEASE stud near the umbilicus hatch, Healy leans to
look down the corridor. Three figures stand before a wall of fire in
the airlock at the far end. The pulse rifles go quiet. The alien
death-screams have faded, but still ring in her ears like a wailing
alarm.
It is an alarm! The two marines and a former take in what's left of
the scene, having been pressed back nearly to the umbilicus hatch.
Amid a raging napthalm fire, the blackened forklift stands as the
only symmetrical shape in their line of sight. Walls have been warped
by heat, shredded by rifle fire or gruesome splashes of alien blood.
Two-meter holes in the decking, and a few sizzling glossy chunks are
all that remain of the swarm. A reeking chemical smoke clings to
their nostrils, a unique smell as of a centuries-old mummy set
ablaze, then doused with ammonia.
The unsteady luminosity of the incinerator fires is the only
significant light source in the airlock, or the hall from which the
aliens emerged. And retreated to. At least one or two of them
vanished around the corner, carrying off what looked like dead
bodies. None of the stunned warriors can remember seeing any aliens
close enough to grab anyone. But there was a lot going on in here.
Maybe they got overhead somehow, crawling on the ceiling? But
somebody would have seen that, right?
Patwardhan absently inspects the tiny unscarred space near the
umbilicus hatch. Somebody had been laying like a hump in one corner,
but he's gone now. Maybe one of the other cops picked him up? No, she
saw the cops fleeing the Gaines. They were in no frame of mind to
rescue anyone. Her medical mind can't help but wonder: they take the
bodies... to eat? They're big creatures, they'd probably need a lot
of sustenance. But as a woman of science, she knows better than to
second-guess evolution. There's no telling what these f-ckers are up
to.
Booths stands up and blinks. The rifles are empty. The aliens
retreated. Score one for the marines. Their blood pressure subsides
enough to permit another sound to reach their battered eardrums. The
Mind Bank's voice rattles through the area, echoing from some section
of the Gaines that still has PA speakers. "...econds. Six airlock
integrity compromised. Emergency seal in five seconds. Four,
three... "
We won. That was the only thing that was going through
Alex Gonzales' mind as he actually smiled a fierce grin at their
seeming vicotry. A grin that faded as the sounds of the countdown
reached his ears. "F-uck!" he yelled as he turned to race down the
small hallway and back into the umbilicus, his non-rifle hand
reaching to grab/pull/get Booths' attention if the Marine hadn't
heard the alarms already. Being a cargo handler on the ass-end of
space meant that you had a lot of time to go over your duties when
you were bored, and that sound was unmistakable as the sound of what
could be death knell, if that lock closed with them on the WRONG
side. Being locked on the Gaines with those things was a fate worse
than death. Or at least he thought so.
Five seconds. Gonzo pulling at him. Booths got up, and shrugged him
off. He took a brief moment to look around. The smell of projectile
propellant and napalm filled the air, burning his nostrils. The sharp
acrid stench of the aliens snuck in there too somewhere.
He swayed on his feet for a moment. Adrenaline was still pumping
through his system, but as soon as it wore off, he'd be hurting.
His mind was torn in two. Stay on the Gaines and get her back from
the m*therf*ckers who had killed the 'Fighting Tigers', or retreat.
This was his ship. His freaking textbooks were in there.
The empty rifle magazine clunked to the floor as he released it from
its housing.
On the other hand, his ghurka was in his quarters.
In that microsecond moment, ratioanlity won out. The Gaines wasn't
going anywhere. He'd get her back. And then he;d send them all back
to hell.
He'd start walking backwards towards the hatch as soon as Gonzo
moved. He fumbled for a spare mag.
He was still a USCM smartgunner. Point man, first in, last out.
If he didn't make it in time. Well, tally ho.
"Gonzo!" Aishwarya shouts, trying to make herself heard over the din, "Start keying in the airlock
sequence. Booths and I will cover you!"
Healy's hand hovers over the control anxiously, she looks
down the corridor to see what is happening with the soldiers (and ex-
soldier). "Marines! Get back here... I'm gonna depreasurize the
umbilical!". Healy curses under her breath. She quickly shoves the
shotgun in her right hand into the hands of one of the nearby cops,
drawing instead her walkie-talkie, "It's Healy here... get a security
team to where the Korea is docked, check the seals, then report to
me... and someone tell Burnett to get his jolly arse down here to
meet me... I've got a situation here he might like to review." Healy
clips the walkie talkie back to her uniform again, then suddenly
realises she feels a little naked. She quickly snatches the shotgun
back off the cop.
Remembering her previous experiments with trying to survive
outside an atmosphere, Patwardan immediately begins a slow, but
steady backward retreat to a safe location. "Fall back, marines!" she
yells not really realizing that there really is only one marine to
yell at unless she counted Gonzo. This more than anything frustrates
her even more as she remembers her lost comrades.
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