ic Incursion: Troopers

[Brown Dynamite]

Roulette spun his arm in the air. It was a meaningless gesture as his squad continued to pull security in the landing zone waiting for the bird took off.  Roulette's squad was positioned as a perfect circle some distance around the LZ.  The amount of time he spent with the Lor military in preparation for taking charge of Squad 3 meant he had ample time to learn the Lor military's actual hand signs.  But, they didn't know that.  Finally, Roulette called out to his favorite  "Jibby bring it in."

 

When the Lor Clone abandoned his position to meet with the Squad Leader.  "Serious question.  Can the bunks on base support a broan's weight when his muscles are put to strenuous activity?"  A look of horror and realization taking poor Jibby's face as it dawned on him what Roulette's inquiry was in regards to.

 

"Sir, I do not wish to discuss whatever act you wish to perform that will lead to the burning of another soldier's sheets.  Now can you call the rest of the squad in?"  Jibby responded almost immediately.  With Roulette not visibly showing the slightest sign that he had actually paid attention to what the soldier had to say.

 

"You're too stiff kid.  Not until the ship is fully clear.  Three four person fire teams.  Grunt leads one, Blood leads one, you get the last.  I will bounce around wherever I want.  Pass off the information to the others, I'm going to look ahead." The Voidrunner didn't want to take the direct path into the Gorge.  If they could ease their way through the ravine without making further contact, all the better.

[Electra]

"Redbird, I need you to get in the sky and be aerial reconnaissance for us, okay?" Erin told the NightRyde as she hopped off and walked to the front of her group of soldiers. "Stay in camoflage mode. Let me know if anything is coming at us from any direction, but otherwise radio silence. "Now remember," she told her team, "if I say duck, you duck. If I say run like hell, you run. Otherwise, you keep moving towards that installation. If we don't shut this thing down, none of us may have much of a future, so we have to get it done." 

 

Some deeply internalized Mark-shaped voice inside her wanted to end the speech with something inspiring, probably "friends to the end!" but she firmly squashed that impulse and set out for the mouth of the gorge, silver staff extended and in her hand. 

[Gizmo]

With a boisterous acknowledgement, Redbird adjusted her chassis such that the Nightryde faded entirely from view both to Wander's naked eye and the more varied senses and equipment of her squad. From up above the autonomic machine intelligence was able to confirm what Roulette's scouting had already told him: while the gorge was more that wide enough for an entire squad to stand shoulder to shoulder and the terrain had numerous outcroppings and smaller caverns, all converted into glossy computronium in the conversion of the planet, they were still ultimately stuck with only one route between where they stood and where they needed to end up.
 
With Wander's squad taking point, the troopers and their commanders descended into the canyon, the walls rising up on either side of of them until only a stretch of sky was visible beyond, fading into black as the planet's night cycle rapidly approached. Ekna turned out to be the only one of his team willing to come within several meters of the Terran, unhappily assuming a position to watch her back by default. The combat engineer who'd introduced herself to Eclipse as Jacia stuck close by the Alarian, evidently taking her new position as second-in-command seriously as she waited for orders or any opportunity to be of help. The bounty hunters in Roulette's squad seemed happy enough to pick from among their fellows to form the suggested fire teams but the rest of the troopers were quickly losing patience with their commander's antics, even as Jilinson-08 did his best to maintain order.
 
One of Corona's squad, a heavyset Lor woman with dark teal splotches about her pale temples that suggested at least some mixed heritage, marched close enough to speak to her. "I recognize the hardsuit, you know," the trooper told her, just loud enough that the chance of someone overhearing lingered. Corona's armor might have been modified and weathered but standard issue was standard issue underneath it all. "Outback Overwatch Patrol & Survey. They're a joke, which makes you the punchline. How do you rate command?"

[Raveled]

Corona turned to the other Lor, her eyes narrowing slightly. "Yep, these days I mostly ride with OOPS," she admitted, her tone falsely amicable. "Mostly keepin' a weather eye on Earth -- or to say it, the homeworld of Terrans. You met one of them." Corona jerked an armored thumb at Wander addressing her own knot of troops. "The lady that kicked a tower to death. Seems like they can all do stuff like that, and an invasion? That's just another workday for a Terran. So mostly, I figure I'm here because I know when to stand back. Or maybe it's down to the flying and blowin' up stuff on my lonesome," she added. "When we get back, I'll even talk about blowin' up a Communion ship from the inside.

 

"But heck, none of that much matters. 'Cause we aren't really here for parade formations. All we gotta do is climb up there," she said, pointing at the comm tower, "and blow it sky high. If yer steppin' up to help corral folks, I'll take it gladly." She patted the other woman on the shoulder, steel in her posture if not her voice. "Otherwise, as long as people point their guns out of th' group instead of in, I'm not asking for much more."

Edited April 4, 2015 by Raveled

[Fox]

"Nah, Alarians don't have tails - well, except for me, I guess," Eclipse was explaining. She chuckled, tail gently flexing through the air like it had heard her. Its vertebrae-like segments clicked softly as she flexed it. "And we heal pretty well - better'n most - so we don't need cybernetics much. But some stuff you just can't heal back from, y'know? Someone way back cracked the trick of keeping our immune systems from rejecting them - special metals and all, from before the empire fell - for when it was needed."

Her tone was friendly, but her gaze was sharp - glowing purple irises scanned their surroundings, constantly, and careful study could spot them rotating a bit as she made use of some more-than-biological functions. "I could maybe heal a damaged eye, but y'burn them out of my head and I might not come back from that on my own."

"Burn...?"

"But the tail," she grinned. "Well. If they're going to replace most of your spine anyway, you may as well get your money's worth, right?"

[Electra]

Wander ignored the antics of her troops, confident that they would at least  watch each others' backs if things went down. It certainly was no skin off her nose if these supposedly tough-as-nails space troopers wanted to reenact her junior year of high school. She had bigger things to worry about right now, like the fact that the entire situation was screaming "trap" to her. "This gorge isn't natural," she commented, loudly enough for the other group leaders to hear her. "Something dug it out, like a giant scoop. There had to be a reason for it. We should spread out," she urged. "One squad after another in a line, in case something goes wrong." She made no move to remove her squad from the front, somebody had to go first, after all. 

[Brown Dynamite]

"We'll pull rear duty."  Roulette declared. There wasn't exactly a good way to position oneself for an ambush in this situation.  Other than maintaining some semblance of spacing.  They were about to give up a lot of ground out of necessity.  Things were going to go badly

 

They always went fracking badly.  "We won't be able to get to cover.  So if anyone sees something.  Shoot first, ask later."  Roulette called out to his squad.  As much as he preferred to take the least amount of action as possible.  The Voidrunners had a well earned destructive reputation.  To which  Bliss and Ruby didn't have an exclusive claim.

 

"And if they see us first?"  One of the non Jibby Lor asked.

 

"Then hope they miss."

[Raveled]

Standing at the entrance to the canyon wasn't getting that comms station destroyed. "Lor to the fore," she called out, rounding up her squad and marching to the front ranks. "Keep yer eyes open and yer triggers itchy. You two." She picked out two troopers at random, a Lor with bulky cybernetic eyes and... a Grue with a pair of ray pistols. Corona blinked and shifted her gaze to the left, picking up the canid soldier. "You two," she said, pointing at the Lor and the canid, "sky patrol. Make sure nothin' comes buzzin' us."

The Lor officer did a double-take when Roulette offered to take the rearguard. She nodded to him, suddenly more respectful. "Just keep yer eyes swivelin'," she said. "An ambush ain't gonna come from the front."

Corona planted herself at the front of the formation, pumping more and more energy into her aura until it blazed brightly, a beacon for the entire group to follow. She considered trying an inspiring speech, discarded the idea, and started marching forwards.

[Gizmo]

The Grue is Corona's squad, looking somewhat ropey in their default form even with armor on compared to their more muscle-bound solid allies, raised a hairless red brow in confusion. "This one is not Lor. Does Corona-Commander still require this one to move forward?"

"I think the Commander's doin' her best to just ignore ya, Jy'mm," the indigo hued humanoid marching next to them snorted, two clusters of four small eyes each blinking as he shifted his grim on his rifle. "Her sort ain't exactly quick to come around to folks on account of where they're from."

Jy'mm creased their brow more heavily, following the rest of the squad's lead as they formed up to the right of the group being led by the Terran. "This one left the Unity to no longer feel disposable, Ron-Digo."

"Soldier mighta been the wrong career path, then, bud-- hey, you feel that?"

Ron-Digo wasn't the only one to notice the faint rumbling sound or the tremors conducted by the computronium to their boots. All around heads swiveled back and forth trying to spot the source but there was no sign of enemy presence from either end of the gorge and a single click from Redbird in Wander's earpiece indicated that the wide, flat plains to either side of them remained just as empty.

[Fox]

Eclipse made a quick turn, scanning their surroundings - literally and figuratively - from where she and her team had picked up the right flank of their merry troops of ne'er-do-wells. Nothing to the sides, nothing up- or down-canyon, as far as she could see (which was considerably further than most), which meant....

She swore in her native tongue, hand going for her blaster and her tail crackling like a whip as it extended to full length, at least a foot of wicked blade sliding out the end of it. "DIGGERS!" she shouted, planting her feet and looking around at the ground. Where...? "They've either got tunnels or they're makin' their own! They may or may not be comin' for us, but either way spread out, don't let them get everyone at once if they dig up or collapse holes!"

[Electra]

Wander gave Corona a glare as the Lor blatantly pushed herself to the front of the formation, but her ire was forgotten as soon as the rumbling began. "Get to the walls!" Wander shouted, having come to the same conclusion as Eclipse. "Spread out and use your climbing equipment to anchor yourselves, then get your weapons ready!" She dug a piton from her own pack and drove it into the wall with her hand to give herself an anchor if necessary, then activated her communicator. "Redbird, get down here, we're about to have company." And then she listened, as hard as ever she could, trying to pinpoint where the breach was likely to be. 

[Brown Dynamite]

Roulette had some choice thoughts about the strange pissing contest for who would lead the squads in the game of follow the leader as two squads were at the front at the moment.  If not for the rumbling.  Something was coming for them.  But, he couldn't make heads or tails of from where.  "I guess we can't write this off as a vacation."  The others seemed to take their choice positions.
 
"Grunt your fireteam, cover the rear.  Bleed your guys take the left walls.  Jibby take the right walls."  It left Roulette with the ground.  Even with his fire teams positioned ready to fire on the first thing to pop up. It would be sheer luck if someone didn't get taken out from one of the angles of approach covered.  Especially if they came from above.  "If a sinkhole appears below you.  Reaching for your climbing gear and hope for the best.  Keep the fire teams a good distance away from each other"

[Raveled]

Corona cursed and widened her stance as the ground started shaking all around them. She couldn't see any enemy to attack, anything to direct her anger against to stop whatever this was from happening, so she turned to the troops instead. "Spread out," she called to them. "Fireteams, put some distance between yourselves!" At the very least, she would make sure that anything coming after them wouldn't be able to get more than two or three troopers at once.

She was struck with the urge to leap into the air. It would certainly make it harder to attack her from the ground, but she squashed that impulse. She kept her feet firmly on the ground, knees bent, ready to leap to the rescue of any troops pulled under.

[Gizmo]

Just as the troopers were moving to follow their respective commander's orders - some more grudgingly than others - the glassy green computronium of the canyon walls and the uneven surface beneath their feet exploded, showering the entire formation with shards of converted material. The figures that erupted forth the newly carved tunnels had once been the planet's native population, tall and gangly by Lor standards with knobby joints on each of their six limbs. They were barely recognizable now, flesh having been carved away to make room for drills covered in gnashing metal teeth and asymmetrical tubing sloshing about something viscous and silver. With electronic screeches the scrambled forth, looking to surround the Coalition soldiers on the right, left and from below!

[Raveled]

Corona reflexively threw up her hands as the canyon walls literally exploded inwards like mines, raining shrapnel on the troops. It all bounced off her golden aura, though, leaving her unharmed -- though the Communion antibodies rushing towards her looked like they wanted to change that! The Lor shot up into the sky, leaving a pair of antibodies to collide into each other on the ground.

 

From her higher vantage point, Corona could look around and see the ground troops, engaged with the antibodies across the entire field. Her blood boiled as she saw all manner of sophonts fighting for their life. She knew it was worse even than that. She knew that if they died here, they would be dragged away and turned into more mindless soldiers for the Communion, more antibodies infested with shining cybernetics. These soldiers wouldn't just be dead, they would be spreading this foul cybernetic tyranny to other star systems, maybe even to their homes.

 

Her cosmic power flowed from her core down to her hands, pooling around her fists until they shone like a pair of suns. With a yell, Corona rocketed across the battlefield, firing off shots as she went. She couldn't see any place where the soldiers could form a line against the pressing enemies. Everywhere she looked,  antibodies and soldiers were mixed among each other. She tried to focus her attacks on a set area, doing her best to clear out an area for the soldiers to group in.

[Fox]

"Air support," Eclipse muttered to herself, turning her head for a moment to survey the battlefield...and, in her vision, paint targets on her enemies, each lighting up with a crosshair only she could see. Her thumb flicked something on the inside of her pistol, and it began to make a rather ominous humming noise. "That's something, at least."

She was barely recognizable when she burst into motion - gone was the jovial, laid-back Alarian, and in her place walked something with the precision and economy of motion of a special ops veteran or an expert mercenary. Her pistol, held with both hands, spat plasma like a rifle twice its size, laying target out of target out while its wielder used natural agility and her tail to keep an inch out of harms way. "FORM UP!" she barked as the group her squad was fighting started to thin out. One swizzling bolt knocked one of the diggers clear off Jacia, tearing through the air an inch from her face to eat a hole in her assaulter - and it had barely landed before two more followed, shot through the now-vacant air to burn the back of one occupying one of her heavy-hitters. "Defensive posture! No backs to the enemy, no openings! Give them nothing, and push!"

[Electra]

"Stay together," Wander told her squad, "fight defensively. And for god's sake, don't shoot me." With that she was on the move, running up the side of the canyon wall and over the heads of the defending troops before launching herself headfirst into the biggest crowd of antibodies she could find. The close-quarters fighting was not quite what she was used to, and many of the niceties she'd developed through years of training just didn't apply. This was raw, dirty, fight-for-your-life-against-overwhelming-numbers stuff, and it took her right back to the beginning of her career. It was not a very comfortable place to be. Still, ripping off heads and shattering spines was as effective for antibodies as it was for zombies, and soon she stood in the middle of a grotesque field of twitching, bleeding antibodies, clutching her bat and looking for the next thing to fight. 

[Brown Dynamite]

Roulette watched as the other commanders showed off their destructive capacity once more.  The Terran mowed through Antibodies like a demon.  Leaving nothing behind in her wake.  The pirate proved that Ruby might not be flying around with the most advance guns in the black.  And the Lor.  He wasn't quite sure what was her story, getting a closer look once again asserted she wasn't doing the typical mentat thing.

 

There were still Antibodies to clean up.  Rather than leave it for the squads to clean up Roulette cracked his neck.  "I guess it's time to run them down."  He took a second maybe two to calculate the angle.  Smiling like a sadist when satisfied.  Placing one hand on his visor, to give the illusion as if he needed the visor, Roulette fired a violet colored optic blast that hit an Antibody dead center.

 

Only the blast didn't stop there.  The Antibodies had enough reflective material for Roulette to angle his shot in such a way that it ricocheted between one and then another until eventually there was nothing left but a bunch of caved in metallic corpses.  Holding on to his visor tightly he walked forward turning around some odd feet later to call out to his squad.  "Everyone in my squad still alive do a headcount and get ready to move.  If you're dead, hold down the fort."

[Gizmo]

"Well, that explains a lot," the thick-necked Broan in Roulette's squad commented to the trooper to his left as they watched the Zultasian bounce shots back and forth across the enemy. The Leche soldier chittered something that the standard issue translators had some trouble with but the gist seemed to be that she wasn't sure that it didn't raise more questions than it answered.

As rifle barrels cooled, the Coalition soldiers took stock. Eclipse's squad had taken some relatively minor injuries - the Za'ak who'd objected to Roulette's attitude wasn't going to be doing much with his off hand for the foreseeable future - but nobody reported any casualties after their first skirmish with the enemy. There was no question that their commanders had been the deciding factor in routing the ambush and even Wander's group seemed to be warming to her in that light.

They didn't have time to chat about their newfound admiration, however, as the ground began to rumble again from behind them in the direction they'd come. This time the sound was more distant but much, much larger and getting closer quickly. "Uh... double-time, ma'am?" Ekna asked Wander a little uncertainly as the rest of the troopers quickly formed up. They certainly couldn't stay put and fight the whole of the world's Communion forces, after all.

[Electra]

Wander blinked as though coming out of a trance, studied the blood dripping off her batless hand for a moment. "Yeah," she murmured, then looked up and said more loudly, "Yeah, let's get a move on, fast as we can. No point in trying to be stealthy at this point. They know we're coming, and they know what we can do. If they had any sense, they'd beat a retreat now, but we're gonna have to fight our way through. Let's see if we can avoid a two-front battle." With Eknu at her heels and the rest of her squad stringing along behind her, Wander set a quick (for normal folks) pace around the worst of the debris and through the canyon. "Redbird, can you see anything?" 

[Gizmo]

"Indeed!" Redbird reported back over Wander's earpiece, her voice buzzing slightly with what the Terran recognized as a note of battlelust. "More of the crude drones traveling at ground level from poleward!" Erin remembered enough of the briefing on the planet to know that meant roughly the same direction they were headed, probably coming out of the settlement turned communications relay to meet them. "The computronium is effecting my sensors but conservative estimates put their numbers in, oh, several hundred, certainly! You should be seeing them coming over the walls of the canyon any moment."

Sure enough little reflective dots were already skittering over the lip of the crevice like a tide of spiders at the edge of Eclipse's cybernetically enhanced vision. They were going to have to fight their way through the antibodies to reach their goal and the longer it took them to get there the more chance the enemy would have to marshal its forces and overwhelm them.

They didn't have long to dwell on that before the ground beneath their feet shook violently and the source of the rumbling behind them revealed itself. A beast hundreds of meters across erupted from the bottom of the gorge, looking like some hideous cross between a mole and a slug, with six gnashing mouths space equidistant around its bulbous head! Wander abruptly realized what had carved the canyon out of the rock in the first place at the same time the Coalition soldiers recognized the telltale mishmash of metal plating and invasive tubing dotting the creature's terrible bulk revealing that it too had been suborned to the Communion's purpose. Computronium crumbled as the invertebrate monster advanced with a garbled electronic roar and a reek of foul outgassing, pinning them between it and the rush of drones!

[Raveled]

It took some time and some finesse, but the Communion antibodies were cleared out without any losses to the troops. Corona personally spent a few minutes on the ground next to the troopers, smashing heads and throwing the bodies to the side. She was doing a visual inspection when the ground starting heaving and split open, and the huge mole-slug creature burst forth. She looked around, trying to take in all the details at once; the mole-slug charging them, the waves of antibodies coming from the opposite direction. She bit her lip inside her helmet; if she was alone, she would go up and soar over all these obstacles and land directly in the communication center. But then, if she was alone she would have been overwhelmed on the way down.

She needed to act fast and decisively, she realized, so she shouted as loud as she could. "Alright! Everyone with two arms an' a gun, listen up. Mission hasn't changed! We still need to get to the comm tower and put a nice, big hole in it. Commanders, I say it's high time we went right down tha' throat of those Communion troops. Everyone else, stay close and stay moving! We'll blow you a path and you come along tight behind us." Corona didn't give anyone time to argue or countermand her orders; in a blink she was in the sky and heading straight at the on-rushing swarm of antibodies. The Lor fired at the antibodies, her shots landing and merging and swelling into huge conflagrations of radiation and energy. She just hoped that if she could disrupt the leading edge of the swarm, the other commanders could sweep in behind her and open up a corridor for the troops.

[Fox]

"Aw, for...."

Eclipse wheeled around, the twin barrels of her blaster still visibly hot and steaming after taking down a not-insignificant chunk of the ambushing antibodies. "Double time, soldiers!" she shouted, zooming in on Corona's assault against the less intimidating force. How many...?

Too many.

"You don't slow down for ANYTHING but a fallen friend," she ordered, "And only if you can get them up and out before that thing catches the lot of you. Now c'mon!"

Today, apparently, wasn't her blaster's day to take it easy. Bolts of hot plasma joined Corona's more explosive counterparts as she sprinted forward, too-slowly whittling away at the barrier between them and success.

[Electra]

"But what about the-" Wander's eyes narrowed in annoyance once again as she looked after the fleeing Corona, but with no time to debate strategy, she mustered her troops. "Move, move, move!" she called to them as she headed forward at a ground-eating jog. "Stay together and don't stop, don't turn around! If I drop back, follow Eclipse!" She pointed to the other squad leader. "Also, don't shoot me!" With that, she plunged through the Antibody line, already weakened by the others' efforts, and mowed down anything dumb enough to still be standing up. By the time she'd finished, the first wave of antibodies was thoroughly broken, so that the troops moving through didn't need to take anything more than potshots at the odd twitching body. "You know that monster back there isn't going to go away just because we don't look at it!" she called to Corona. 

[Gizmo]

Wander's attacks brought a section of the gorge wall to her left rippling with cracks, sheets of striated computronium sliding down to the floor of the geological feature while the anitbodies crawling upon it struggled in vain to avoid being crushed beneath it. The troopers dodged flying rubble as they ran full out over twisted metal and dessicated flesh spread out around the massive blackened scorch marks left by Corona's blasts, superheated nanite solution steaming in noxious clouds from the debris. Following Eclipse's lead they concentrated their own rifle fire on the pockets of six-armed meat puppets that managed to get past the Terran and Lor commanders, the sound of laser punching holes in protruding cybernetics almost lost amidst the sound of churning stone and terrible bellows coming from behind them as the mole-slug proved efficient at destroying the evidence of the bloody swath they were cutting toward the comm relay. The closer they got, however, the more they caught up to the main body of the charging antibodies, their numbers becoming denser as they skittered over the bodies of their fallen brethren to surge forward, claws glinting in the sporadic red glare of battle.