Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5226915" data-attributes="member: 143">Session 23 (September 29, 2008)Chapter 102Pain.  It greeted him warmly, searing everywhere.  He tasted blood, and smoke, and could feel the heat even before he heard the sound of the fires, the angry crackle all too familiar from demolitions missions in the past. He opened his eyes, but couldn’t see more than smoke.  He was lying on his back, he realized, the awareness of his body coming belatedly through the haze of pain.  He reached up with difficulty, the joints of his armor resisting the effort, and pulled off his helmet.  His ears were ringing, drowning out everything but the busy noises of the fires all around him.  “Gyah!” he exclaimed, as he tried to fight his way up.  The best he managed was to prop himself up on the one arm that seemed a little easier to move than the other.  He was in the corridor outside of the room with the tubes, or at least he thought he was; looking back through the doorway, all he could see was fire and rubble.  He glanced back the other way, and saw the sectoid with the launcher lying on its back, a jagged piece of metal the size of a banana protruding from the middle of its face. Coughing, fighting through the pain that accompanied every movement, Vasily was able to pull himself up to his knees.  The armor whirred and clicked but obeyed his commands, for the most part.  He crawled forward to the doorway, and looked into the room beyond.  The place was wrecked, that was pretty damned obvious.  He saw Hadrian propped up against the inside threshold of the doorway.  The Marine was conscious, but Vasily saw at once that his right arm was stuck at an unnatural angle, the heavy armor cracked and twisted. “Broken,” he said.  “What happened?”“We got hit by…” he began, then realized he had no idea what the alien weapon had been.  “Jane?” Hadrian jerked his head, and Vasily saw Jane lying along the opposite side of the room.  Mary was there, tending to her, intent on her work.  Vasily dug into the medical satchel each of them carried for emergencies, in case one of the doctors couldn’t make it to them in the press of battle.  He was relieved to find the single medikit there intact, and after fumbling a bit with his gloves he was able to stab it through one of the holes in his armor.  “Used mine already,” Hadrian said.  “We’ll see if Mary has another for you,” Vasily said.  He tried to stand, and was a little surprised to find that he could.  He helped Hadrian to his feet, the Marine grunting in obvious pain as the motion jolted his broken arm.  Then he walked over to Mary and Jane. “Is she all right?” he asked. “She’s breathing,” Mary said.  “I injected her with a medikit; it should help.  You shouldn’t be moving, you probably have internal injuries.  We felt the blast below; it shook the whole ship, tore a hole ten feet across in the floor, but the lift still works.  Is Hadrian…”“Broken arm.”  “Watch her for a moment while I…”As she got to her feet, Vasily interrupted her.  “Give me your plasma pistol.”“What?”“I lost mine.  We still need find bridge.”“Vasily, you’re in no condition to fight, none of us are—”“We not finish ship, many more than us die,” he said, turning away, and moving toward the door.  Behind him, he heard Jane groaning, but he didn’t look back.  Hadrian stayed put just long enough for Mary to inject the contents of a medikit into his shattered arm, then he fell in behind the Russian.  By some miracle he’d held onto his plasma rifle, which he carried in his good hand. “Help Jane, get down to others, get ready to go,” Vasily told Mary.  “Vasily—”    “Go.”  He turned and headed back into the corridor, limping slightly.  He bent to recover his helmet and replant it onto his head, although it was doubtful what protection it offered in its current condition. The corridor seemed to bisect the entire level of the ship.  They passed a few unremarkable side-chambers, checking only to verify that no aliens were lurking within before they pressed onward.  Then they came to a large door that opened onto another big room, one whose purpose was immediately obvious. “That is one big gun,” Hadrian commented. The room was shaped like a disk, with massive banks of machinery built into the walls.  It looked like the entire chamber was designed to rotate on its axis, like a big turret.  The alien cannon filled almost all of the rest of the space, its barrel easily a full meter across and over ten meters long.  There was an aperture port built into the ceiling near where the barrel ended, the opening currently closed.  For a moment the two men just stared up at the cannon, realizing that they were looking at the weapon that had destroyed three of the world’s leading cities.  Then Vasily started forward, Hadrian just behind him. “No ammunition stores,” Hadrian said.  “They must bring the shells, or whatever it shoots, up from a lower level.”  He nodded to large mechanism connecting the breech of the gun to the mount in the floor.  Vasily grunted, making his way over to the gun.  He looked over the mechanisms for a moment, then opened one of the compartments in his armor and drew out a small package, slightly smaller than a paperback book.Behind them, the door opened again, and both men spun around, guns at the ready.  But instead of aliens, it was just Jane, who confronted them a bit unsteadily.  Her armor was blackened with soot and plasma burns, and she too had lost her faceplate, showing a face caked with dried blood and more burns.  But her expression was determined, and indicated that she would not be retreating. Vasily nodded in acknowledgment.  “Watch corridor,” he said to her and Hadrian, taking up his device and opening a small panel on its front.  He quickly punched in a code, and slid the package into an open port up near the breech of the cannon. “Better save one of those for the Elerium,” Hadrian suggested, as they quickly made their way back out into the corridor.  “Not risk gun remaining intact if we fail,” Vasily said.  “And if the explosion manages to detonate the ammo?” “Then mission complete.”  They continued down the connecting passage, which curved around to the left ahead of them.  The door to the cannon room closed behind them, but they could feel the heavy thump when the explosives detonated.  They passed another pair of smaller doors, but Vasily focused on another set further ahead, a wider set that opened onto the space on the inward edge of the curve.  But as he started toward them, he felt a sudden intense sensation of vertigo.  The corridor seemed to stretch and elongate until it formed a twisting tube, the doors distorting into a gaping mouth that opened to reveal tongues of bright flame.  “Aaaah!” he yelled, almost falling as his elbow jarred against the wall.  The ground bucked under his feet, and he couldn’t quite manage to steady himself.  Behind him, Hadrian and Jane were also having trouble.  The doors continued to spit fire, and bright flashes were exploding around them.  Something kicked him in the leg, and he fell to one knee, his pistol skittering out of his grasp as he tried to steady himself. “Get… out… of… my… mind!” he yelled, as plasma explosions continued to erupt all around them.</blockquote>

Verification