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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5327215" data-attributes="member: 143">Session 29 (November 17, 2008)Chapter 131Vasily’s ears were ringing as he pulled himself up.  He was dimly aware of flashes all around him, and bright streaks as plasma bolts streaked past.  His eyes focused on the plasma cannon lying at his feet, and he bent to pick it up.  Something kicked hard against his shoulder, and he felt a surge of heat against his neck, but the experimental heavy armor held up against the impact, and within a few moments the heat dissipated.  He lifted the cannon, scanning the landscape ahead.  The mass of sectoids and cyberdisks were still a good hundred meters off, if drawing closer, but he ignored them, searching for a specific foe. “Magnify, four times,” he said, and his VDU responded, focusing in on what he thought he’d seen, toward the back of the enemy line.  The sectoid specialist was reloading the bulky blaster launcher; as Vasily watched, the alien snapped the chamber in the rear of the weapon closed and lifted it to its shoulder.  The Russian lifted his cannon, already feeling a sense of dread as he took aim, knowing he’d never get the shot off before the sectoid, especially since the alien only had to point the blaster bomb in their general direction…But even as the alien popped up in his sights, there was a flash, and its head exploded.  Vasily glanced over at Jane, who was on one knee, her plasma rifle with its long-range sights at her shoulder.  But before she could fire again, two plasma bolts slammed into her chest, and she was flung over onto her back once again, wisps of superheated gas rising from the black smears on her armor.Vasily opened fire, hitting the closest cyberdisk.  The plasma cannon bored a hole in the hull of the alien machine, which spun wildly for a few seconds before exploding.  A grenade arced over the battlefield, flying some eighty meters before it landed, bounced high once, and then exploded in the midst of a cluster of sectoids.  The aliens were flung in every direction, and Vasily blinked in surprise before he remembered that both gravity and air resistance here were a small fraction of what they were on Earth.  Then there was no time for any thought, only a blaze of plasma bolts and bright flashes that seemed starkly bright against the dull reddish landscape.  The entire battle lasted barely a minute.  Vasily looked over the landscape of broken metal and blackened alien bodies as he loaded a fresh cell into his cannon.  Catalina trudged over to the alien specialist, and picked up the blaster launcher.  “Still functional,” she reported, after checking its mechanism.“Did anyone see what happened to the Avenger?” Mary asked.  “I’m not getting anything on my radio.”“All I saw was a bright flash,” Jane replied.  “Still, if it had been destroyed, wouldn’t we see the wreckage?”“Not if it made it over those hills before going down,” Hadrian said, pointing at the ridges along the far horizon.Vasily looked back at the members of the team.  All of them bore black marks on their armor, either from the airburst from the alien blaster launcher, or from hits sustained in the subsequent battle.  But thus far, they all seemed to be intact.  Mary was tracking their bio readouts on her VDU, and had an extra control pad to meter the injection of the medikit material into the bloodstreams of the team members.  Vasily felt a slight flush as the alien biomaterial worked its way through his system, purging pain and weariness, but leaving him feeling a bit jumpy.  “Either way, we can do nothing about it now,” he said.  He pointed to the cave mouth that the aliens had been guarding.  “Mission that way.”The cave became a ramp that descended deep under the Martian surface; their VDUs indicated that they’d covered a good two hundred meters before it began to level out, and another fifty before it opened onto a cavernous interior.  The place seemed to be of natural origin, or at least it looked that way, with irregular walls, and a ceiling that varied in height from as low as three meters to as high as ten at its apex above them.  Natural pillars linked floor and ceiling, in some cases thickening to subdivide the cavern into distinct chambers.  The place seemed eerily empty.  The Alphas made their way deeper into the complex, their lamps brightening a circle around them.  Their helmet beams probed into the side tunnels they passed, but none of them seemed to go anywhere, at least as far as they could see.  They came to a natural staircase that descended along several broad tiers to a gallery ringed by a small forest of pillars that ascended to a broad dome some twelve meters above.  Faintly luminscent specks were visible on a number of the pillars, but there was no clue as to whether they were caused by organic entities or just some sort of chemical reaction.  Catalina, scouting along the edge of the chamber, pointed toward a dark opening.  “Looks like a tunnel there,” she said.  She took a step in that direction, but stopped as the motion sensor on her hip clicked softly.  It worked much less effectively here, as the minute distortions in air displacement that it detected were almost invisible in the thin Martian atmosphere, and she immediately realized that for her to get a signal here, the movement had to be close…“Aliens!” she warned, but even as she moved the others saw the sinuous forms that slithered out from between the pillars, plasma rifles in their hands. “Cover!” Vasily yelled, as both the snakemen and the Alphas opened fire.</blockquote>

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