Nerrone's Rangers IC

"...That is not pretty."

Grey was stunned by the Mallium's condition, he was a nothing more than exposed flesh connected by a few patches of skin, any normal person would be on the ground screaming right now, but he just slouched up like a zombie and ran straight at him. This was not what Grey wanted, he wasn't in good condition himself, and this guy was probably a much more experienced at close combat than he was. Any mistake would probably cost him his life. Grey knew running wasn't an option, he had to stay and fight. He grabbed his pistol and began shooting at the Malium as he closed the distance, aiming for his legs and hoping to immobilize the silent one so he could finish him off.

A shot tore clean through Azure's left foreleg as he advanced. The assassin, finding his legs giving way beneath him almost in slow motion, reached out with his right arm and made one final knife lunge as he fell forwards — aiming, in the loosest sense of the word, for Grey's neck.

His implants kicked in the second Azure made the final lunge, Grey beat Azure's knife out of the with his wrist blade before it even came close to his neck, and responded by calmly walking over to the Mallium, raising his pistol at Azure's back, and firing three times. He wasn't sure if it would kill him, but at the very least, it would make him stay down. He walked away from the motionless body of the Mallium, and made his way towards Dagon.

"You may want someone to watch him, make sure he doesn't get back up. Now if you would excuse me, I need to go pump myself full of drugs and go play with Flank's cannon. We still have work to do."

Flank picked himself up off the floor just in time to see Grey roast Azure, and then shoot him in the back. While he wished he could have been the one to kill him, he was almost laughing at how happy he was to see the Mallium die. After all, he didn't say he would kill him, he just said that he was as good as dead.

He limped over to Grey. "Man, when this is all over, I'll owe you..." he counted on his fingers, one for every time Grey had been a help. "Four pistols. I just wish I could have helped you out sooner myself."

He looked down at the Mallium. It was finally dying, thanks to Grey's well-timed intervention, but he also agreed that it could still find the will to live somewhere behind that visor. He hobbled over to Azure and aimed his cannon at his head, and did what any noble victor would have done in the situation: he started taking all his stuff. The bandolier of throwing daggers came off first, then the serrated knives were pulled out of his charred hands.

"What kind of modifications did you have in mind, Grey?" he asked, still kneeling beside Azure. "I'm really open minded about increasing my own fire power."

He reached forward and slowly pulled the visor off of the Silent One's face. He could taste the aroma of burning flesh, and he had to admit it was strangely appetising. Whether or not it was alive, he whispered to the creature: "You know how I said you were dead? It wasn't an idle threat."

As well as the assortment of blades and the visor, Flank found a pair of smoke grenades fastened to the dead assassin's waist. Obviously they had been disregarded during the fight due to the wind gusting intermittently through the broken window. The moonblade and throwing knives were both rather specialist weapons — the latter in particular would be next to useless without the proper training — but the two curved, serrated blades and the matching pair of stilettos could yet come in handy.

The visor was an oddity among this haul: Inside, it was lined with padding to disperse impacts, and the surface of the lenses glowed with numbers and words — an integrated HUD, the lettering too small to make out without having one's face pressed up against it. Without much closer inspection it was also clear that the inner surface hosted a number of conventional computer ports, allowing it to be connected to other devices, and also an unintrusive neural interface, marked out by a pair of metal plates placed roughly where the user's temples would be expected to rest.

Flank held the visor in front of his chest where he could see it, and slowly pressed it against the robotic lens. The view it provided was much the same as that of his scope, only instead of a cross-hair, the world seemed to be covered in blue, glowing characters. Numbers flashed across his field of vision, and it dawned on Flank what an assassin would have in absence of a computer. He held the visor triumphantly over his head.

"This is it!" he proclaimed. He turned on his heel and dashed halfway to the computer terminal where he and Bor failed to guess the correct password. The other half of the distance he limped as a sharp pain from his ribs caused him to bend over.

He looked at the ports along the side of the visor, and then for any matching plugs that matched them. He found one: a very messy looking collection of metal pins that he would have believed to have been ruined from the exploits in the command hub of Sapphire Point, had he not the visor's counterpart to confirm their integrity.

Flank held the visor up to the plug on the terminal and clicked it into place. That garnered a response from the terminal. Flank knelt down so that he could look through the visor with his scope. A long string of commands scrolled upwards, and Flank could make neither heads or tails of it.

"Oi Kwa," he called, the harshness of his voice masking a lack of deepness, "I think we need someone who can use this mask over here."

"Neural interfaces..." Kwa did not seem particularly thrilled with the idea. Her hesitation was only brief, however — there was no escaping the sound of the orbital beam cannon tearing into the city below. Kwa swiftly took up the visor and put it into place on her head.

"Mmph ph mmph!" She exclaimed. Clawing the device from her face, she tried again:

"It's wiping the system. We don't have much time." Fishing around in the satchel at her waist, Kwa retrieved her field computer and a dangling mess of cables. It took several tense moments for her to connect the two devices.

"Downloading now. This had better work."

"Uh, guys?" Dagon called out from across the room.

"What?"

He pointed. In the sky above Santa Frerraro, the Sword of Damocles, strike cruiser of the Kingdom, was turning.

Bor eyed the Sword of Damocles, which appeared to be adjusting its heading. "If we loaded all our explosive weapons onto one of Flank's flak rounds, would the blast be enough to kill that cruiser's shields?"

"No, but we could create a shockwave that could capsize the entire ship. Now quit breathing out of your mouths and give me some space." Grey yelled to Bor, he didn't care if he sounded outright rude, it was do or die at this point. He looked over to Flank.

"I won't have time to modify your actual Cannon, but I should be able to multiply the explosive force of one of your rounds. I just need to gut some of your artillery and pack them into one round. It should remain aerodynamic, and the recoil shouldn't blast your shoulder off your body. Give me the best stuff you have, this should only take a minute or two." Grey then became aware of Kwa, who was working feverishly with Azure's visor and one of the computers.

Or, we could just wait for her to reposition that orbital satellite over the ship... Grey thought to himself.

"Hey sweetheart! How much time do you think it'll take you to get control of that orbital death ray?"

Flank ran up to the window and looked down at the Lacuna. "A have a load of explosive ammunition down on the ship. It will take me... hmm... about two minutes to fall down and fly back up."

Without another word, he spread his wings and activated his jet boots. He wavered in the air worryingly, but he managed to right himself, and he began to descend. Because he couldn't use one of his wings to its fullest extent, he had to take the fall easy; that is, he had to take it slow.
He spiralled all the way down, adding to the dizziness left by his lack of blood. When, at last, he reached the courtyard, he was seeing stars. He limped over to the ship — as far as he knew it was there — and clambered up the landing ramp.

The first thing he did on the ship, rather than collect his ammunition like he said he would, was look for something to patch up the hole in his side. It wasn't hard, a pile of first-aid supplied had been stacked on the table before they arrived in Santa Ferraro, although now they were just scattered on the floor. He picked out some painkillers, a clotting agent, some bandages and a disinfectant swap, and promptly cleaned and bandaged the stab wound.

The next thing he had to do was restore some body fluids. The fridge hosted a colourful array of water, so he took a jug and drained it, swallowing the tablets while he drank.

Much better.

Finally, he made his way to the room he had left his belongings, and picked up his ammo box. He didn't pick out any particular ammunition this time, he just took the whole damn box. He hurried outside and took to the skies again. The ascent was slower, and by far, more difficult than the descent, but it was by no stretch of the word impossible.

At last, he reached the open window and clambered back into the command hub. "Grey," he said, "maybe now you should learn what else was in the ammo box when you tried to make it explode."

He set the box on the floor and opened it. Inside were his four types of ammunition. There were a dozen FlaK rounds, ten shells, around thirty mortar bombs and at least forty plasma bolts.
"Imagine what would have happened if you set this on fire? That said, there's enough explosives in here to create a massive shock wave."

Rhak just stared blankly at the cruiser. The others already seemed to have a plan. But another had formed in Rhak's mind.
"Can we use the satellite to blow up the cruiser? It will be on the edge, but I think we can make it in time."

"Bravo Team: progress report."

"Objectives complete, Commander: intel retrieved, package in place, proceeding to the aft exhaust vent for evac."

"Great work everyone. Remember to check your grav-chutes — I do not want to lose anyone to an equipment malfunction after all this."

"Roger that — don't reckon any of us are interested in falling to our deaths, sir. I'll check in with you for pick-up when we make land-fall. Over and out."

It was nice to be back in the pilot's seat again — even if it was just one of the Coalition's bulky shuttles, and even if the threat of being blown clean out of the sky was ever-present. Commanding officers in the Coalition didn't often have the chance to take to the field solo like this.
_________________

Kwa shot Grey a cold look for his remark, and returned to the download. As Flank made his return, she rose and disconnected the cable linking her computer to the Silent One's visor.

"The code is 2-632-080. Someone get on it now."

The satellite would take some time to receive new orders and re-align — hopefully not more than a few moments for the first stage. Hopefully.

"Got it." said Flank. The water he drank seemed to be making his voice recover fro the poison, and didn't sound so much like gravel. He ran over to the terminal, next to which Kwa actually stood, and punched in the code he had been given. 2632080. He couldn't jab that enter key hard enough.

((I reserve the right not to have my characters do everything. ))

The terminal accepted the code, finally, and the appropriate software was laid out before on the screen before Flank. The interface was primarily a long, complicated list of numerical variables, many labelled in obscure jargon or shorthand, but the settings that had last been applied, that now had the beam boring a hole through the city, were still there, and at least a few of the key elements appeared to be familiar.

The Sword of Damocles had stopped moving. Its starboard gun batteries, a row of hefty anti-cruiser cannons, were now aligned with Sapphire Point.

This wasn't the first time Bor had been in such a situation. Almost ten years ago, he - under a different name - was almost killed when a Lynski cruiser attacked and destroyed his vessel during the Marin-Si'hu uprising. He'd survived that disaster by locking himself in an airlock and using a bio-dampener to mask his life-signs until the cruiser moved off and a rebel ship came to pick up survivors.

Unfortunately, it didn't look like he'd be able to pull off any such tricks this time. Not with the tower badly damaged and stuck on a city that would very soon be destroyed by an orbital weapon platform. Nope, things were looking pretty grim.

However, with Flank's sudden access to the satellite's control matrix, things suddenly became a little brighter. Keeping his eye on the strike cruiser outside, Bor said tensly, "Remember, just a short burst. We don't want to bore right through it and hit the city."

Grey opened the box and looked at all the ammunition inside. He shuddered, if he managed to blow that ammo box up, he would have been long dead, along with the ship, and the entire platform.

Back to work, you're out of time

Grey grabbed several Flak rounds and popped them open with his Wrist blade, it was composed of mainly a warhead and a series of counter-balances to keep the round upright as it flew. Grey grabbed both of them, and gutted four more FlaK rounds. He then grabbed a Mortar shell and placed it on the ground. Using his jump jet, he welded the counter-balances to the back of the mortar, and then gutted the war heads and welded the miniature missiles to the front of the shell. If the mortar went off, so would the missiles. The final product was a mortar that was about forty times more powerful powerful than a standard mortar or FlaK round, and only a few inches wider. As an added bonus, he grabbed one of the plasma bolts and welded it to the end of the mortar, and then grabbed a lose electrical wire and jabbed it into the plasma bolt, the plasma became unstable and would burn off slowly when set off, acting as a primitive propellant for the mortar. It would act more like a rocket, allowing Flank to fire the round straight at the ship, rather than at an arc. His end product was a round about 40 times more powerful than anything flank could have used. He grabbed it and handed it to Flank.

"Do not drop this thing, I can't really attest to it's stability."

He looked over to the ship, and saw that it was visibly getting ready to fire.

"Now come on! Lets test this thing out!" Grey yelled, he began running towards the broken down wall, and used his suit's built in range finder. He found the ships distance relative to their position, and had his suit calculate the trajectory of the round, it came up with the travel time between the round being fired and it hitting it's target, and what angle it should be fired at.

"You're going to need a 30 degree angle to hit that thing, I repeat. Position your cannon at thirty degrees!" Grey yelled, he wasn't sure what the status on the orbital satellite was, but he wanted to buy the others as much time as he possibly could.

Flank held the Frankenstein round with awe. He only wished he had more of them to play with, but he didn't. He opened the back of the cannon, in the same fashion he would if there was a jam, removed the remaining bullets there and carefully slid the round into the chamber. His cannon closed up without issue.

"OK, here we go." Flank said as he knelt down next to Grey. He grabbed the edge of the window for stability and aimed his cannon out of the window, adjusting the angle of elevation to thirty degrees.

"Alright, here we-" CLICK!
The round didn't fire.

"No." Flank opened his cannon again and took out the makeshift round. Because it was home-made, igniting the round wasn't guaranteed as it was with the factory-made rounds. It was harder to find a contact point where the round could be fired.

"Come on..." he groaned, placing the round back in the cannon, rolling it over to find a better point of contact. He closed the chamber, took aim and fired again.

CLICK!

Flank swore in exasperation. Removing the round once again, he took a good look at it with his scope, increasing the zoom to get a close-up. There was hardly a contact point at all, the plasma round was off centre.

He looked down at some of the debris left over from his exploits with his cannon, and picked up a thin rod of metal. He held it next to his jet boot and activated it at minimal thrust. The flat, bunsen flame melted the end, and he carefully attached it to the end of the plasma round, so as to not set it off with a hot pin.

He put the round back in the chamber, lining the pin up with the centre of the barrel. He closed the cannon, took aim at the strike cruiser, raised the angle of elevation by thirty degrees, grabbed the edge of the window and fired once again.

Words can not describe the volume of the explosive CRACK-BOOM! of Flank's cannon, but they can describe the knock-back. Despite his grip on the windowsill, and his strong stance, and his quarter-tonne mass, Flank was thrown backwards through the air, only to collide violently with the wall next to the double doors, shards of rock crunching beneath the metal armour on his back and tail. He slumped to the ground and lay there for a moment, trying to figure out whether or not he had broken his shoulder. Since he couldn't feel any strong pain other than a deep bruise, he got back up again.

To his delight, he could see a bright red flare zooming towards the strike cruiser in a beautiful parabola. Judging by the fact that his cannon wasn't blasted apart like a banana peel, Flank could safely say that the round had not exploded, even in part, on its way out of the barrel.

As he pulled himself to his feet, he couldn't help but feel a little proud that he'd been able to fire something like that. He put a hand on Grey's shoulder and waited for the product of their resources and ingenuity to start a controlled demolition.

The rocket whistled through the air, its slow, graceful flight turning into a jerky spiral as something inside came loose. Its winding trajectory carried it downwards, under the enemy cruiser, to explode unseen on the wasteland somewhere beyond the city.

The Sword of Damocles didn't even bother to engage its countermeasures. Instead, it returned fire: the vessel's targeting computers picked out the top of the tower and launched a single round through the broken window. This was a real ship-to-ship weapon; the sort designed to disable spacecraft bigger, even, than the Sword. It made impact just on the lip of the balcony.

The entire right-half of the Communications Hub was bathed in green fire. The light was blinding. The sound, deafening. Broken pieces of computer and shattered pillars flew out across the entire room in a barrage of deadly shrapnel.

Delta wrote:

"Neural interfaces..." Kwa did not seem particularly thrilled with the idea. Her hesitation was only brief, however — there was no escaping the sound of the orbital beam cannon tearing into the city below. Kwa swiftly took up the visor and put it into place on her head.

"Mmph ph mmph!" She exclaimed. Clawing the device from her face, she tried again:

"It's wiping the system. We don't have much time." Fishing around in the satchel at her waist, Kwa retrieved her field computer and a dangling mess of cables. It took several tense moments for her to connect the two devices.

"Downloading now. This had better work."

"Uh, guys?" Dagon called out from across the room.

"What?"

He pointed. In the sky above Santa Frerraro, the Sword of Damocles, strike cruiser of the Kingdom, was turning.

Chalen had to force himself to abandon his mission. His face was iratating him all of a sudden. Chalen carefully brushed his face to get rid of what was on his face. He then examined his clawhand. The cause of the problem was these spark debris's, how they ended up on his face Chalen had no clue. Chalen's thoughts were interrupted by a sudden yell.

"Uh, guys?"

Unfortunaly Chalen reconised that voice. It sounded like Dagon is worried about something. Quick as lightning, Chalen flew to his leader.
---
(Bianca) "This cannot be a good sign."
She was still in around the same area kinda close to Kwa's position. Bianca saw the cruiser ship of Kingdom turning. Something told her that thing wasen't doing it for fun..

Bor dove back as the blast ripped apart a large chuck of the room. He didn't see what happened to the others, but he seriously doubted all of them could have made it unscathed.

I told them we should have passed on this mission. I told them, but did they listen? No!

Flank watched with utter dismay as the makeshift round spiralled off course — he would enlist Grey to devise a proper schematic much later — but he only felt worse as he realised that it was the cruiser's turn to shoot.

In desperation he resolved to at least take the knives he had collected. He scooped them up, knelt down by the window, and prepared a sturdy jump. For him, time seemed to slow, and as he pulled thrust himself into the open air, the Sword's round struck the tower.

The shock-wave of the explosion sent him tumbling through the air, and it was all he could do but graip the knives tighter so that they didn't accidentally cut him. He opened his right wing, gauged the direction in which the two fell, and adjusted his position accordingly. By the time he was upright, he had fallen halfway down the tower.

He tapped the inside of his boot's heels with his foot, and they almost rushed up into his pelvis as they roared to life. Flank took the chance and spread both wings wide in the hopes of catching as much air as possible, while increasing the thrust of his boots to maximum.

Like a teenage driver braking as hard as possible to spare the life of a pedestrian, Flank and Rhak didn't seem to be slowing down fast enough. With such a long, unresisted fall, Flank couldn't bring himself to a downward velocity that wouldn't kill him.

The only option left was to change direction. He leaned forward, and with a great strain, flapped down at the ground behind him. The result was painful but reassuring: Flank's wounded wing split open at the first three stitches from the bottom, but it was enough to send himself on a diagonal descent. He leaned further forward and flapped again — this time with less resistance — to level out just a little more. He was gliding at a thirty five degree angle from the ground.

About five metres from the courtyard with which Flank had already collided, he furled his left wing, rolled over to the left and braced his back for a monstrous impact. He should have braced his lungs, because it drove the air straight out of them. Flank bounced off the ground and tumbled backwards, holding onto the knives to make sure they did not escape in this critical moment. He flipped all the way around and hit the ground back-first again, before bouncing and rolling to a halt.

In the seconds following the blast, Kwa's mind briefly left the material world behind for one where she was completely deaf and blind, and could feel only the air rushing by. It would be a while before the cuts and bruises even registered, but she felt the hit her shoulder took as she flew backwards — a pillar on the left side of the room caught her, spinning her around to land face-first on the floor.

Sight and sound returned, with pain tagging along merrily behind them. Kwa groaned and slowly rose to her feet, left arm limp and unresponsive. Dagon was lying nearby, draped over the intact computer bank on the left side of the room. At a glance, she could not tell if he was moving.

She took a ragged breath and tried a few words, not certain who was listening: "We still... We still have to..."

"It's over!" Bor screamed over the chaos. "They're gonna fire again any second. We have to get out of here while we still can!"

He activated his comlink. "Flank, if you can hear me, we need you to get the Lacuna up here. Try to fly behind the tower as much as you can; that way the strike cruiser won't be able to hit you."

Grey had his doubts about the reliability of the round, it would be impossible to create a factory grade explosive, but he thought he would at least make it to the ship. He was caught off guard when the round promptly spiraled downward and hit an innocent building.

Spode, it's like some relentless teenager is screwing us over at every turn

He decided he would need to get his hands on some proper welding equipment at some point, along with a black-market fabricator. As he recceded into his personal thoughts, he didn't notice that the ship that they just tried to attack had decided it was time to shoot back. Grey didn't even have time to react before his back was bathed in a green explosion, he was blasted forward into the air by the force of the explosion. For a horrible few seconds, he was in complete shock, unable to do anything but watch the courtyard below get closer and closer. As Grey regained his awareness of the situation, he knew he was going to break something, his jump jets wouldn't be powerful enough to slow him down in time, and the surface he would be landing on wouldn't exactly be soft.

It's the difference between a broken bone and death, might as well stick with the former. Grey thought to himself, he switched on his jump jets, and two orange flames came to life below his feet. He could feel himself slowing down, but it wasn't enough. He braced himself for impact, and closed his eyes, getting ready to withstand the pain of a bone being broken.

Grey slammed against the dirt of the courtyard, anyone around him could clearly hear the sound of his bone in his left leg snap in two. He looked up to see Flank and Rhak on the same platform, before the pain forced him into a fetal poisition on the ground. He didn't even haven the strength to cry out in pain.

"There's still time."

She wasn't sure if it was true, but the terminal Flank had opened was still operational, the satellite control interface open on the screen. Kwa, however, could see it as little more than a blur of light spilling from a monitor nearby.

Outside, the Sword was moving again, this time descending ponderously through the sky for a better angle of attack.