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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5351659" data-attributes="member: 143">Thanks Richard! Here we go!* * * * * Session 30 (November 24, 2008)Chapter 142Suddenly a massive explosion drew their attention back behind them, up into the darkness of the shaft.  The Alphas fell back against the walls as a huge slab of metal came crashing down, accompanied by a shower of stone that send up a wild cascade of dust and debris.  Catalina was knocked from her feet, and James almost had his head taken off by a broken metal strut that shot from the wreckage and bounced hard off the wall of the chamber before settling to the floor.  For a moment they couldn’t see anything, even each other, as the cloud of dust swirled around them.  Then, out of the cloud, they heard the familiar whine of engines, and the Avenger appeared, its VTOL jets firing to arrest its descent.  They caught a momentary glance of Ken in the cockpit, then the ship began to turn, the hatch in its rear opening as the pilot furiously worked to keep it stable in the relatively cramped confines of the shaft.  “Move, MOVE!” Vasily yelled, pushing the others forward.  He all but threw Mary and Catalina into the open hatch, then boosted James, who in turn helped pull Jane up, then Hadrian.A jagged metal spar jutting from the rubble scraped off the Avenger’s belly, and the ship jolted to the side, nearly knocking James from his precarious perch.  Ken fired the jets to compensate, and the ship rose into the air, with Vasily now alone in the hangar below.  A white flash exploded in the rubble behind him, followed by the bright streaks of plasma trails as a shot flashed past him, then another. “Ken!  Vasily’s still down there!  Go back down!” Catalina yelled. The pilot screamed something back, but they couldn’t hear over the violent rumbling that now suffused the shaft, which seemed to be shaking itself apart.  The Avenger’s engines whined as Ken struggled to compensate.Vasily glanced back, long enough to see the alien forms materializing out of the darkness, their features brightened by the flashes coming from the barrels of their guns.  Mutons, and behind them, another hulking, mechanical form…Vasily looked back up, fixed on the hatch, and fired his jets.  He shot up into the air, and for a moment, the hatch seemed to yawn like the bright opening at the end of a tunnel.  But the turbulence in the shaft grabbed the Avenger and shifted it, and the Russian slammed hard into the rear hull of the craft, hard enough to stun him.  He was falling… and then he clipped the extended edge of the hatch.  He balanced there for an instant, precariously, but gravity took hold, and he started slipping over the edge.He blindly reached out for something, anything, to arrest his fall.  A hand seized on his, and he was held.  “GO!” he heard, and then his full focus was on holding onto the hand anchoring him, as the Avenger’s engines blasted on full, and the ship ascended up into the shaft.  He looked up, and saw it was James holding him, the doctor’s other arm looped through the supporting strut of the hatch.  Then other hands were reaching for him, pulling him inside the ship.  The Avenger jolted as something struck it, then he caught a glimpse of jagged stone, almost close enough to reach out and touch, and then they were through, and the familiar red skies of Mars were there, stretching out almost to infinity.  The Avenger continued to turn as it rose into the air, and Vasily’s heart froze as he saw the alien battleship, also rising out of the landscape, ascending above a massive crater, maybe a few kilometers distant.  The ship seemed to defy gravity itself as it fully cleared the level of the ground, slowly lifting into the air like the fist of some defiant god. In the corner of his VDU, the last digits clicked down to zero. His first thought was, It did not work.  Nothing happened; the Avenger continued to rise, as did the alien ship, now high enough that he could see the far side of the crater underneath its rising bulk.  A wild image of the Avenger crashing into it popped into his mind, but it was crazy; even a suicide attack would do nothing to stop such a monstrosity.  Then, the ground rose up. The Avenger jerked forward, and the Alphas cried out as the ship was nearly flipped over, spinning in the air.  They felt a moment of terrible vertigo as they felt themselves falling, then the disorienting spin eased, and the ship leveled out again.  Clinging to the straps holding him, Vasily crawled back toward the still-open hatch.  He had to know. The battleship was there, hovering in the sky.  Underneath it, the ground bucked and roiled, a new landscape being formed before his eyes.  And then a light appeared at the base of the crater, a flash like the glow of a new sun.  It stabbed up into the air, piercing the alien battleship, driving through it, up into the sky.  For a moment it lingered, a bright marker visible throughout the Solar System, then it flared out and died.  It was as if it had been keeping the battleship aloft, for as the spear of light died, the alien ship fell, plummeting back into the crater.  Vasily didn’t see it hit, for the hatch closed as the Avenger straightened and shot up into the sky, rising on full thrusters back into orbit.  Leaning back, tears sliding down his cheeks, he closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of its death.</blockquote>

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