ic Incursion: That's Amore

[Gizmo]

Jack's stomach lurched as he felt the syrupy remains of almost dried fluids stick to his gloved fingers. He'd been certain; even setting aside his metamagi senses the Knights' movements had been all wrong, devoid of the fluidity a trained fighter should have shown. As the red helmet bounced across the lunar surface and he spotted the desiccated, long dead remains inside his chest tightened again. He'd been expecting robots but could these actually be suits of armor acting on their own with their slain owners still rotting within? He wasn't even sure how to process that as he turned to face the goldenrod imposter's wrath, ready to put the remaining four down hard and sort things out afterward.

Then Steve was there in front of him, so sure as usual that the only acceptable target preset was Steve, impaling himself just to make a point. The thought that this was what it must have felt like for his team every time he did something idiotic briefly crossed his mind in the split second before green laser fire was sending showers of moon rocks erupting upward all around them and his priorities realigned.

The crimson light of the armor he'd trisected was smooth and polished, cherry air freshener and pomegranate dish soap, artificial and clean in contrast to the raw wrongness of the termimus radiation. Normally he had to concentrate to shape borrowed energy into something he could use, tease and cajole it or willfully force it into place. This felt malleable as modeling clay, preprocessed for this exact purpose, a glossy red concept car designed with formulas and wind tunnels. So lets see what happens when I put the pedal down and give her some gas.

The swordsman coiled his legs beneath him and launched upward in the lower gravity of the moon, gripping his energy claymore in both hands and drawing it over his head and beyond his back. With a shout lost in his helmet and the vacuum around them he brought the blade down in a single great swing. The weapon construct swelled in size as it arced through the void, gaining very real momentum along with the illusion of mass until it reached nearly half the length of a football field, falling atop the silvery spaceship like a guillotine carved from rubies.

[Fox]

"Wh- no, we were just talking, Jack, no subvers--"

Dragonfly's shocked protests were cut off as her attention was split two ways - part of her multi-threaded mind took note of the contents of the rent armor, something about it seeming...terribly off, while the rest snapped up to regard the sudden appearance of the hostile ship. She'd spent untold hours pouring over the video Miss Americana's digital friend had brought back - she knew that design.

She stared up at it for a moment, mulling over the implications of its arrival and their yet-incomplete Earth defense not-a-weapon. "....no," she decided. The air around her twisted, six small objects appearing in a half-halo around her body: each was no larger than a football, one end blunted into a large, glowing blue eye.

At some unseen signal, they turned as one to regard the vessel; each eye turned a neon red before unleashing a barrage of directed energy fire at their target.

[Gizmo]

Once the shouting had started over the comm channel Jill had considered simply throwing an airtight force field up around herself and charging out the outpost's airlock but with her Farsider made spacesuit already halfway on she simply gritted her teeth and muttered under her breath until she had the helmet on and its seals engaged. Tapping her foot impatiently while the airlock cycled, she dashed out onto the lunar surface as soon as the door irised open. Looking upward to follow the streaks of energy from Dragonfly's drones, she pulled a face. "There's a spaceship, now? I leave you people alone for five minutes..."

Throw her hands upward with an unladylike grunt, she sent forth a rippling wave of bioelectricity, looking almost like a shimmering blue aurora before it coalesced into a solid translucent barrier over the heads of the assembled heroes. "Woah, and who cut off that guy's-- actually, stupid question. Jack! Stop cutting off people's heads! This one's been dead for ages already, anyway," the medic added with a grimace, trying not to look too closely at the visible bits of the Knight's corpse.

[Avenger Assembled]

The azure-tinted "Star Knight", who had remained silent through melee and Communion attack alike, inclined its head up at the newly-arrived vessel as if surprised to see it. A regular Star Knight might have flown out of the way or up into battle to attack the enemy ship overhead, but these were by no means regular Star Knights. Instead it fired a blast of energy from its outstretched hand, one that passed through the force field overhead only to scatter harmlessly against the silvered body of the spaceship above. 

 

It spoke to the others in fast binary, a language that only a few of the assembled heroes could understand despite the rapid-fire 'shouting' it was doing over the noise of the battle. 

 

There is no help here! We should have sought the brass one! 

[Electra]

"Look, I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding!" Miss A called to the faux-Star Knights, "but you approached us under false pretenses when we were literally minutes away from a war! I'll be happy to take a look at your suits and see if that one can be fixed as soon as we're not all about to be completely destroyed. Going to Talos isn't going to help anything, he's a first-class villain and he probably fled the dimension weeks ago anyway." She punctuated her speech by flying straight upwards, a little wobbly in the low gravity, and shooting a barrage of red, white and blue laser beams from her fingertips. They scattered against the hull of the ship, burning patches where they touched. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Increasingly battered though it was, the great ship overhead opened fire, pouring down devastating bolts of energy that chewed up the Lunar surface, sending clouds of crackling powder everywhere. The cloud spread wide, covering the heroes and the Knights they'd been in battle with, going so far as to sweep against the nearby Farsider dome. The cloud was thick and sparked with static energy, Lunar dust charged with whatever was powering the Communion ship's lasers. (Pure cosmic energy, as far as Jack of all Blades could tell, crackling bright the way a passing Star Knight might; or the way Willow had when she was jacked up on Gorgon.)

 

In atmosphere they might have been choking on the energy-raddled stuff, but as it was they were simply blinded by the smoke. Still pierced along the side by an energy blade, Harrier stepped back into the cloud cover, wishing his suit's sensors penetrated such a rocky shield better. They could not miss at this range...

[Ecalsneerg]

Geckoman wasn't so great this distance from an enemy. On Earth, in this situation, he'd be in his ship. If it came in closer, he could probably jump to it, but it wasn't a great idea just yet. 

 

So he made himself a smaller target, weaving back towards the others in a zig-zag, semi-crouched down. "We're right out in the open here, guys. No fortifications, no preparation, in a pretty alien place too." He shrugged inside his spacesuit. "I propose we fall back to an actual defendable position. Star Knight dudes, sorry for the misunderstanding, maybe we help each other not get shot down like sitting ducks?" Geckoman grinned. "Unless someone wants to throw me up there, haha."

[Avenger Assembled]

Silence crackled on everyone's comm systems as the energized Lunar dust, blocking everyone's comm signals. 

 

Inside her sanctuary in the dome, Gina Evans felt the link go dead as if she'd tried to fly into a rainstorm. 

 

Sensing trouble, Harrier raised his pike and fired straight up - blinded or not, his instincts were true and he struck the ship above dead on. It was a palpable hit, one that smashed into the hull of the craft above near a weapons port and overloaded the cannon, producing an internal explosion in the vessel itself. Trying to fire through the cloud, it didn't sound like the Knights were that lucky. 

 

Meanwhile, inside the dome, Gina could feel vibrations permeating the whole structure as something began pounding on the sides - and then the sound of depressurization alarms from outside her shelter as something broke through!

[Gizmo]

For Jack the sudden radio interference was like standing in a light drizzling rain only to find oneself abruptly bone dry. With his team effectively blinded, unable to coordinate and still unclear just what was going on, the fencer found his frustration rising palpably. At least I haven't gotten shot yet. That thought gave him pause as he readied to take another swing at the silver spaceship firing down at them. Oh, son of a @*$%#--! It was the same tactic that made up his own proverbial bread and butter: keep your opponent too angry and confused to see what you were really doing. If whatever they were fighting wasn't actually there for them then there was really only one other thing nearby on the airless rock worth a cosmically involved ruse.

Ignoring the dust blocking his sight lines, the metamagi focused on the familiar static thrum of his sister using her powers and set off in a loping sprint across the low-gravity satellite. Getting close enough to make out her outline he barely slowed before knocking his helmet against her own, grabbing her shoulder with his free hand so that she couldn't jump back in surprise. "Hey! The dome!"

The vibration of his voice carried across the touching face plates and sounded inside Jill's helmet. She maintained her focus on her force field with some difficulty and tried to parse what he was saying. "What?"

"The dome!" He pointed in the general direction from which she'd run moments before. "They're just messing with us while they make a grab for the magic physic rock thing! Also I remembered how sound works in space, I'm actually pretty proud of myself right now!"

"Even after straight-up decapitating the red dude?"

He shrugged as much as he could without breaking contact. "Jury's still out on that part. C'mon! They've probably already broken in by now!" Without further explanation he took off again, a translucent red blade the size of a surfboard held aloft over his head as he dashed toward the outpost.

[Fox]

Dragonfly swore as her HUD reported the loss of her drones, though with communications down there wasn't anyone to hear it - she knew they weren't lost, of course, she could still feel the echoes of their little AI minds at the back of her Datalink; they were, however, cut off from her suit, and as soon as they realized it themselves they were likely to retreat or re-pocket themselves.

She left them behind, trailing moon dust off her boots as she shot up out of the cloud on four neon wings - and with a quick glance around the area and another choice word or two, veered off toward the dome. "Tactics," she muttered over her still-on-the-fritz radio suite, to anyone and no one who could hear her. Space twisted around her gauntlets, bolts of science launching down toward...what she could only guess was the general area of whoever was attacking the dome. "Hate the smart, tactical ones."

[Gizmo]

"Gah, get back here--! Ugh." Jill groaned completely to herself as she set off after her brother at a dead sprint, trying not to let him get far enough ahead of her to be lost in the billowing lunar dust as flashes of laser fire and explosions created blurry afterimages around them. As the vague shape of the dome loomed in front of them, she skidded to a halt and planted her feet. "No, you know what? Jill O'Cure may talk to herself in the third person but she does not run back and forth like a twit. Screw this noise." Clenching her right hand into a fist she gathered a dense, crackling ball of energy around it, the blue light nearly opaque before she dropped to one knee and slammed it into the moon's surface. The ball exploded outward in a half-sphere of force, passing harmlessly though her fellow heroes and the armored knights alike but pushing the dust away like tidal wave. As she got back up to her feet and dusted off her gloved hands imperiously the entire area had been swept clean.

[Avenger Assembled]

Inside the dome, the link was gone and Gina could feel the entire complex shaking as something big and powerful battered at the very material keeping their atmosphere and environment in place! Redirecting internal cameras revealed only dark shapes moving outside and a cloud that blocked all sensors - and something hammering its way in! The sick whine of alarms outside told her that something had breached the armored structure's surface and air was being sucked out of the complex! 

 

- 

 

Outside, Jill's rapidly-spreading force field disrupted the electrically-charged dust cloud that had interfered with their radio transmissions and their sight, giving them a clear view of the things breaking into the the Farsider dome. And what things they were! They were all familiar with robots and killing machines and instruments of death; all-too-familiar after their careers as superheroes. But the Communion drones would, under other circumstances, have been comical - they looked like translucent soap bubbles cast to earth, with lunar dust dotting their surfaces. But the big spheres, each taller through the middle than Harrier, were no laughing matter. They rolled into the dome, again and again, battering at its tough surface, forcing a breach that one began forcing its way through, a charred mark on its back showing where Dragonfly's blast had struck home. 

 

- 

 

Inside, as the dust cleared, Gina felt the link open again to the hovering Miss Americana unit, just as the azure-skinned robot fired a blast into the hovering Communion ship that tore away another chunk of its hull, exposing raw, bubbling inorganic flesh within. 

[Electra]

Outside in the thick of the battle, Miss Americana had been fighting like normal, right up until the comms went down. Suddenly the superheroine seemed disoriented, almost lost,dropping ten feet before hanging suspended in the air, looking around wide-eyed as though trying to remember what she'd been doing a moment ago. She reflexively dodged a few pieces of debris that came her way, but made no immediate move to rejoin the battle. 

 

Inside, Gina slammed back into her chair and automatically put a hand to her nose to stem the bleeding that always followed a forcible ejection from her robot body. "What the hell?" She automatically tried to project back into Miss A, but the air was full of hissing static that drove her back into her body with nothing more than a headache to show for it. Then the pounding started, and before she could really think about it, she was down under her desk in a very unheroic crouch, listening to the ominous bending of metal. Alarms began to blare, and Gina swore she could feel the air starting to go thin, even though she knew her quarters had their own sealed oxygen supply. She tried to remember the emergency procedures for hull breach, but all her photographic memory wanted to serve up right now was gory images of explosive decompression and bodies sucked into the vacuum of space and flash-frozen.

 

Even when the static from her brain started to clear away, she couldn't seem to claw her way out of her own mind and back into the safety and sanity of her electronic shell. Gina clamped her hands over her ears and tried to concentrate, swearing that if she somehow got out of this, she would never, ever leave Earth again. 

[Avenger Assembled]

The azure-skinned robot fired a blast at the overhead spaceship, finally driving it to pull away, further into the airless Lunar sky and out of immediate blast range from the heroes on the ground. After all, the battering spheres it had dropped to attack the dome seemed to be doing their job! Still half-numb from the earlier blow that had cut through his armor, Caradoc felt a sick sense of dread as he saw the dome begin to crack - an instant before cold, steely resolve took over and he began outright hobbling towards the hole in the wall, ready to fly there as soon as he'd gathered the energy to power his jetpack. 

[Ecalsneerg]

Radio voices crackling to life again in his helmet, Geckoman turned to run after Erik towards the dome. He could see where the weird spheres were hammering into it, trying to force a hole. That'd be disastrous. It couldn't be allowed to go ahead.

 

He forced himself harder, feet sending him bounding into the air in the low gravity, to come down and force himself in the air again. His bounding sprint led to him overtaking Erik swiftly, screeching to a halt in a shower of moon dust in front of the breach. In front of the giant dome-busting spheres. Well, great.

 

Geckoman flicked his belt, sending his staff floating up and into the 'air'. He deftly snatched it, surging forward towards one of the spheres. He wasn't big or strong enough to really stop them. But he figured if he hit them hard enough they'd stop rolling. Deflated soccer balls didn't roll, right?

 

He hit one of them like a small green comet, swinging his bat side-on like he was playing baseball with a thunderous CRACK into the side of the metal. Or at least he imagined the CRACK. Space wasn't very loud.

[Avenger Assembled]

The sphere, already looking cracked and brittle from Dragonfly's spatial attack, actually shattered in a miniature explosion at Geckoman's blow. Like a Prince Rupert's drop cast from nanite-spun silicon, a properly applied blow caused all its kinetic energy to be freed at once and release a shower of razor-sharp fragments that flew everywhere. Geckoman was left with a scored visor but nothing worse, and a good thing too, his spacesuit lacked the regeneration that his flesh did! 

 

For his part, injuries aside, Caradoc knew he couldn't let those balls into the dome - not when there were innocent Farsiders defending their posts there, not when the key to the Moonstone weapon was there, not when _Gina_ was in there. He took off with a grunt of effort, the pain a familiar friend as burning entropic fire powered him forward, landing in the gap opened by the balls but not yet crossed by them. He swung at one and missed, the brightly glowing blade in his hand scattering across its surface, but he took its counter blow without falling. Instead he dug in his heels and took the hit on his undamaged shoulder, the ball whirling frantically for purchase in the lunar soil but finding none as Caradoc dug in his spiked feet. 

[Gizmo]

"Nice!" Jack cheered as the obscuring dust was pushed back, pausing only for a split second to take in the revealed situation before changing direction to sprint across the lunar surface to skid to a stop next to Caradoc. His cherry red energy sword had snapped back down to long, lean precision instrument by the time it was sweeping parallel to the ground to slash deeply into the sphere that had slid away from the injured cyborg's attack, catching it on the rebound before it could reorient itself against the unexpected second strike. "They got piñatas back where you grew up, Steve?" he asked over the comm system, grinning through his visor and squaring his shoulder with his friend's so that they filled the gap in the dome with swords and determination.

[Avenger Assembled]

"...yes," replied Caradoc, after a moment's pause in the fighting. "But unlike yours." It was that tone that meant there was a terrible story there - a tone that Erik had heard a lot from Steve over the years. But suddenly another sphere was surging forward, fast enough to batter Erik aside and slam him down onto the dusty Lunar surface below hard enough to rattle his teeth. The ball didn't roll over him, maybe because it had spent its momentum knocking him down, but the way was now clear for the spheres to sweep inside the dome!

[Fox]

Dragonfly breathed a sigh of relief as the dust was swept away; her HUD lit up with each drone that came back online, still down by the surface where she'd initially called them up to fight the ship. In an ideal world she'd still have them target the ship, but she'd never lived in an ideal world: a quick scan of the newly-revealed battlefield said she had higher priorities.

Her mechanical posse had no sooner made it up to her than she pointed them straight down - their gaze followed her index finger as she gestured accusingly at the...sphere?...assaulting Jack, and like one they lit up red to rain light down from the heavens. "If we lose the dome I can start pocketing people - don't like the option. Not permanent; plus, armor damage threatens to strand or eject them. Please tell me we can seal that hole."

[Gizmo]

"Pshaw, 'can we seal that hole'," Jill's voice scoffed over the radio as she jogged across the uneven lunar surface toward the breach in the dome. "I appreciate you setting me up to be awesome, muñequita, but come on." With a wave of her hand she brought a crackling blue curve of coherent bioelectric energy into being over the gaping hole, ignoring the insistent tingle in the tips of her fingers warning her that she was overexerting herself so many fields of such size in such a short amount of time. The barrier fitted itself across the dome's surface until it completely airtight and while she wouldn't have wanted to disparage the workmanship of their hosts she was pretty sure her powers were considerably more durable than whatever the Farsiders had used to construct the dome in the first place.

[Electra]

Miss A snapped back to life with a gasp, flailing in a very uncharacteristic way for a moment before regaining control of herself. She looked at the dome with eyes still a bit wider than normal, but things seemed to be under control there, for a very loose sort of definition of the term. It didn't look like the dome was in immediate danger of collapse, anyway. "I hate space," she muttered under her breath. "Every time I go to space it just sucks so much. Never going to space again." With that, she extended her hands, fingers pointed out, and shot red-white-and-blue pain at the nearest enemy... whatever it was. She didn't care, she was just pleased by the new scorchmarks it was now sporting on its hull. 

[Avenger Assembled]

Unlike cybernetic intelligences in Terran science fiction (and some Lor adventure stories), the Communion is not actually a hive mind. It is, now and forever, one mind, one voice, one goal. The Lor have had plenty of occasions to learn this in the last several months as Communion vessels ram populated worlds at relativistic velocities, the better to sow dissension and terror among their organic enemies. The heroes of Earth, having had less exposure to the cybernetic invader, were new to this information - information graphically demonstrated as suddenly the remaining balls exploded with tremendous concussive force that belied the near-vacuum of the Lunar surface that should have prevented any such catastrophes..

 

Afterwards analysis of the explosions, at the hands of the two super-scientists present, would explain how the destruction of the battle spheres was not simply a conventional explosion. Overloading the ball's central propulsion units caused an anti-gravitic eruption that propagated outwards with terrific force, violently repulsing everyone and everything in the area with terrific speed while at the same time sending shards of super-tough shrapnel slicing through them like so many hot knives the size of a man's arm.

 

At the time, what it felt like was an explosion of terrific force, vacuum or otherwise, one that seemed to go on and on, followed by a deadly rain of projectiles. Caradoc tried, too late, to shield Jack of all Blades, but instead was nearly blown off his feet as the antigravitic eruption sent him hurling backwards against the tough material of the dome behind him. He felt, more than heard, parts of the dome crack against the sheer force of the explosion, and dug his pike into the Lunar soil in front of him to try and prevent being hurled away any further. 

 

When he could finally pull himself away and back on his feet, he turned to see the ominous sight of the Farsider dome almost completely shattered, held together only by the timely application of Jill O'Cure's force field. He struck the side of his armored head, activating the cellular implant in his jawline. "Report," came his voice, a soft, urgent demand, as he looked around for the others. 

[Ecalsneerg]

Geckoman landed on his back amid the debris with a small thud. "Blargh," he stated confidently. He'd leapt skyward instinctively when the spheres had detonated. Unfortunately, in this gravity, he'd both gone up much further than anticipated and came down much more slowly. He slowly came up to his feet, shaking off the moon dust. Man, it was going to take ages to clean it out of the nooks and crannies of his belt.

 

"I'm alive! Not dead. That'd suck." He shook his head slightly. "So. How fast can we repair this dome? I mean, we're out here. On the Moon. Without all that air stuff that we've got unfortunate issues with. Unless we can get inside, we can't make with the bandaging. And if Jill's holding it shut, she can't do that."

[Fox]

Dragonfly brought a hand up as the battle spheres went off - her shield didn't come up quite in time for the entirety of the blast, bits of metal soundlessly scraping past one of her shoulder plates, but it bore the lion's share of the attack. The gravity blast, as it turned out, rather worked in her favor: it was almost visible as it interacted with the bent fabric of her shield and force field, streaming outward along their surfaces as it came and pulling the shrapnel with it.

"Fine here," she replied, touching down on the lunar surface. "Lost a drone, but no other harm done. How long can you hold that shield, Jill? Can try to create something to shore up dome until safe evacuation - Miss Americana or I can - but might take a few minutes. Otherwise we need to evac now. While dealing with our unexpected guests. And hoping that ship doesn't come back."

[Gizmo]

"Let's put it this way," Jill's reply came over the comm line in a strained grunt, the usual note of sardonic amusement washed out entirely, "whatever the plan is, assume it needs to go into effect right the @#$% now. Because it kinda does." The dust from the explosion settled enough to reveal the medic crouching on one knee, her right hand outstretched and wreathed in brilliant blue light while the left was clamped tightly over her opposite shoulder. The force field over the broken dome was holding for the time being but she could already feel the sweat beading on her forehead growing slowly cooler.
 
Her brother was in arguably even worse shape, lying unmoving on the lunar surface with his eyes closed tightly. "Ow..." he managed by way of a status report, the syllable escaping as more of a cough than a coherent statement. "Nnh. Anybody get th' license plate of th' moon truck...?" He was dimly aware of his words slurring even as a familiar pain told him that at least one of his ribs was at best bruised, most likely broken. He shoved his body's protests to the back of his mind; nothing new and they still had work to do before he could afford to stay down. "Steve, gimme a hand up, yeah?"