Post
Thu Jan 03, 2019 11:02 pm
#328
by Talvieno
Update time!
"I'll pay it all up front," Saoirse says amicably about the 1500 cred price for her upgraded MUSE. "I might as well, I have to pay it anyway."
Dennis Hoffman chuckles, tapping his PDA. "Good enough for me, lass! It's in writing now. The folks down in the hangar will be happy to hear it."
The conversation between the two - Saoirse and Hoffman - segues gently into Irish, which may be more comfortable for them both. Saoirse still manages to muck things up like she ever would, but Hoffman is a rather patient and understanding old gentleman, and if she does happen to screw anything up, or say something offensive, he merely chuckles. After all, he's part Scottish, too.
"Aye, I grew up near Ulsteradh, it was practically in my backyard," Hoffman laughs, wiping under his cap. "Falainey I had cause to visit once or twice, but we mostly kept to ourselves, you know. Speaking of that, did you ever visit a little shop called The Rolling 'Nuts? Best damn doughnuts I ever had, second time I visited New Galway."
The conversation continues on for a while in the same vein, dancing from one subject to the next under the grand umbrella of nostalgia... and eventually it reaches the point where Saoirse is just about to offer to play her bagpipes for the man, when something most unfortunate occurs...
~~~
Suddenly, the voice of SCAMPS echoes over the Nemesis's intercom systems. The lights across the ship dim to red; warning alarms begin screeching in tones of urgency.
Battle stations! All crew, man your battle stations! Enemy vessel sighted at CQB range! Suit up only if convenient! Medbay, prepare for incoming!
~~~
Five hundred crewmen freeze in horror at the sound of the alarms - the second time they've heard it in a week. The peace they've enjoyed for only a matter of hours is shattered, and fear courses thickly through the claustrophobic corridors. The inmates from cryo react in a similar manner - but with confusion. What do they do? Where do they go? Nobody even told them - and now, with an enemy ship bearing down from close quarters combat distance, there's not any time to find out.
"Cad é an ifreann? Who would attack us now?" Saoirse shouts in surprise . After giving a quick apology to Hoffman, she grabs her infantry gear and leaves, limping towards the Battle Bridge - where Brom happens to already be headed at that moment, having already given an apology to crewman Alessia down in the hangar as he left and thanking her for boring holes through his teeth. It's a long story.
Down in the depths of the medbay, Vynkor and Ishmael swear and toss down their tools and gloves, rushing to the hangar with Gene limping behind on crutches. "Bloody hell! Guys, wait!" he calls, but they're already too far ahead to hear.
Bob gets left behind completely, still trying to process everything that's going on - and left alone in the dark but for Jimmy as the lights flicker and dim.
Throughout the Nemesis, lights go out, entire corridors and rooms at a time, as the reactor crew rushes to shut down all non-essential power consumption. Atop the Nemesis, the point defense turrets grind into reluctant action, engineer squads scrambling to manually load the massive mechanisms.
In a darkened accessway deep in the ship's engines, Frank grabs the toolkit and supply crate that one of the engineers thrusts at him. "Come on!" Antez calls out, up ahead. "If we're in here and the hull breaches, we're as good as spaced!" Frank struggles to keep up, wide-eyed, terrified, just trying to remember to breathe.
Without warning, a powerful impact rocks the ship, sending the scattered inmates staggering against the walls. The crew rushes past them without bothering to pause; only hours ago the inmates were heroes, but in this moment they are all but forgotten.
The battle bridge is wild and unyielding as Saoirse charges (or limps) through the doorway with Brom close at her heels. People shout, struggling to make sense of the situation. This isn't at all what the movies made space combat out to be.
Another explosion rocks the room, sending Saoirse and Brom both tumbling to the floor; the crew here seem to handle it better, having been through a few battles, but they aren't handling the battle itself well at all. The reason soon becomes clear when listening to the cacophony of urgent voices.
"Damage report!" someone shouts. "Where were we hit?? We need a damage report!"
"Port side, hangar's armor! There's not much there keeping it from breaching!"
"Dammit, hull breach in engineering, sector C-14!"
"Gods, why is this happening again?? We just got out of this! Oh gods, we -"
"Where the fukc is the captain? Has anyone seen him?"
"Major! We have visual! Putting it on the screens," someone calls from the next level down. As Brom and Saoirse get warily to their feet (Brom helping her with her crutches), screens light up all around the bridge with imagery from a drone's camera: a battle-scarred heavy cruiser. She's almost close enough visually to make out the name. The tumult calms as the same thought courses through everyone's minds: why are they so close?
Someone else interrupts the silence - a woman at a console, hand on her headset. "Port nacelle's PD now initiating return fire. Central main coming online in a minute thirty."
Caleb, woken from a deep sleep, jogs through the creepiness of the pitch-black corridors using his PDA as a lamp to light his way. From what he's gathered, the ship is under attack and they're shutting off the power in "non-essential areas". Apparently this means the bunks.
On his way towards the main decks, he checks through his PDA for someone to contact - hull repair, hopefully. With some great difficulty he manages to find Gonzz Rotanda. The PDA says he's back in lower starboard engineering, so Caleb makes up his mind to head in that direction.
The ship rattles beneath Ishmael's feet with a distant hum, the vibrations from rapid-fire point defense systems firing at full blast.
"I need my ship and armaments!" Vynkor shouts at the top of her lungs, straining to be heard over the ear-shattering din of heavy machinery and desperate mechanics. Most of them are wearing spacesuits in case of a hull breach, but a few working nearby hear her cry and start jogging in her direction. Beyond them, the deck is in utter chaos. Engineers dash across the flight deck carrying heavy parts and materials as they try to ready a handful of CASKETs. With the Nemesis's point defense being a laughable joke in the face of almost any adversary, the fighter pilots are their only chance, and everybody seems to know it.
"Vynkor!" someone shouts - a mustached man with a raised faceplate waves her over. Vynkor hastens in his direction, passing Ishmael as he watches in patient silence.
Another familiar voice roars loudly through the hangar, sounding ever so slightly inebriated. "SOLDIER! WHAT'S THE SITUATION!" It's Buck, of course, and as Ishmael recognizes someone else there, he starts jogging in Buck's direction - just as Gene catches up behind him.
Buck stands near his CASKET in the middle of the hangar, in a cool action-movie pose. The nearby engies are hastily combing over the rest of his ship, which is already almost at a workable state. "Just a little more!" one of them calls frantically. "Your computer is back and functional again, we just need to -"
"Here's your gear, Mr. Buck!" someone else shouts, pushing a cart of weapons and suits at what amounts to a near-sprint. "Ishmael! Gene! That's three - Vynkor, that's four! Oh, and you're back there, too! Who are you?" The man with the cart points behind the group.
"Meh Bob," Bob grunts, sulking. "Bob just found job."
The man nods dismissively. "You sure did. Grab your radios and I'll patch you through to Cho, just as soon as -"
The deck shakes violently, interrupting him; racks stored on the raised balconies on the far wall of the hangar break free and topple over. It's not difficult to discern that the enemy is firing at the hangar's armor.
"It didn't breach! The hangar's fine!" someone behind Sukava says, his hand to a headset. The armory sighs audibly with relief, but the air remains tense. Sukava is just getting to the front of a line of people retrieving their infantry equipment - all bigshots that have seen a dozen or more battles. They're the anti-boarding platoons - or what's left of them.
Hoffman grunts and hands Sukava an armful of gear. Behind him, people are passing gear from one to the next like pails of water in a bucket brigade. As soon as Sukava grabs her purchased items - a nanoglob pack, a CRISP, and an electron sword - she moves quickly out of the line, just in time for Officer Hoffman shovels the next armful of equipment to the guy behind her.
Atop Sukava's little stack of gear is a scribbled note: There's been a mistake. We'll give you more creds after this, sorry! She doesn't know if it was a mistake... but she's sure as hell not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The floor rattles and shudders ominously.
"Ay, you!" a man calls out, pointing a finger. Caleb slows to a stop, stumbling a little. These prosthetic legs still suck. "Yah, you mate!" The man is surrounded by a group of other spacesuited engineers, and has a wrench in his teeth while he taps viciously at a PDA. "Danald Schwaizenaiga at ya service. Ya ridey to gow op and fix that arma? Look like yahve hald a ranch baffor innit aiden mite!"
Caleb looks at him for a moment, then hesitantly says, "No, I really haven't. Pretty sure not."
The man takes the wrench out of his mouth and plops it into Caleb's hands. "You have now, mate. I'm gathering up crew to head topside to engineering, sector C-14. We've got to seal off the breaches before there are any more casualties. You in?"
"It shouldn't be possible," one of the techies on the battle bridge breathes, his hands shaking. Saoirse peers over his shoulder.
Behind them, Brom is booming a speech that nobody wants to listen to: "I have heard word of the imminent attack, and I'm ready to offer my services!"
Saoirse rolls her eyes and looks back at the techie's array of holoscreens, and in particular, the imagery of the enemy ship. "That's not the cargo ship we saw," she whispers quietly, to no one in particular. "Oh, I know!!!" And she proceeds to give some very annoying, very useless advice about how to get the most out of the camera's lenses.
"It's no good!" someone shouts out from the deck above her. "Our PD rounds are just pinging off their shields!"
"We'll have to switch to CASKETs then," someone else calls out in aggravation. "Where the fukcing hell is the captain?!?"
"Hull breach in upper engineering! At least four casualties!"
Brom, by this point, has found a communications officer and sidled up to him. "The Great Brom Keegan, at your service," he declares with a graceful, sweeping bow that nobody notices. "Shall I take over communications and end the hostilities before they begin?"
"Can't even get them to respond to our hails, so that's not going to do a shitting thing," the officer mutters. Then, louder, his mouth to a microphone, "This is the Nemesis, property of Tartarus Incorporated! We are not hostile! Please identify yourselves and your intentions!" It's the same request he's been making for the past three minutes, and nobody's answering... verbally, anyway.
The Nemesis shudders again, another powerful round hitting the side of the ship. Across all the decks, the crew staggers, but quickly return to work.
Someone finally announces they've found acting captain Havor Maluk: he was sleeping in his room.
"It's a miracle they haven't wrecked us yet," the techie whispers, completely ignoring Saoirse's insistence that she could up the video quality. "Look at the size of those turrets. There's no way they're firing at full clip. It shouldn't be possible... ...Unless... Unless they don't want to destroy us at all.."
Saoirse rattles on, not hearing a word he's said. "All I'm saying is that if you got the data from a second drone and combined it with this one, you could have a two-dimensional image, and we could use that to determine how far away the enemy ship is, and by extension you could figure out how big it is! ...Yes, just like that! That's great!" she exclaims, almost clapping as he switches the camera view to that of a second drone. The enemy vessel is just beginning to draw alongside the Nemesis, and from this camera's angle, the size of it is a lot clearer: it's a good bit smaller than the Nemesis, but every bit as heavily armed as the battlecarrier should have been. The name is visible, too: The Hy'sak Visacri, a Fysar name, painted on the side in dark red paint with the appearance of fresh blood.
And that's when they see it - the techie spotting it only a moment before Saoirse. He gasps in surprise, shock - he stutters for a moment and then calls out, "Boarding tubes! There's - they have boarding cannons! They're opening the hatches - they plan to board!"
Over at Brom's station, his officer suddenly presses the earpiece to his ear and shouts, "They're hailing us! Patching it through to the captain's quarters!"
Ishmael, Buck, Vynkor, Gene, and Bob are all suited up in the hangar, with Vynkor and Bob climbing into the cockpits of their CASKETs. Nearby, Anabais, Crank, and Mekkin are getting into their own ships. It's hard to imagine that only three minutes have passed since the alarm sounded - it feels like it's been five to ten times that.
A voice speaks in their helmets: "Hi guys! It's me, Cho... Things look really bad right now, and Reyha is asleep, so I'll be in charge of anyone that's made it in to the hangar in time. That means you too, Anabais! Yay!"
"Fukcing joy of joys, you rainbow-glitter retard," Anabais mutters over the comms.
Cho laughs as she replies, "Aw, I love you guys too. We're going to do great today, okay? Chins up! This is exciting! Get ready to take off on my mark - we're going to do it all at once. How many people do we have? Four... seven... eight? Okay, eight! Eight is good! Let's get out there and make sure we give the enemy something to remember us by!" she assures them encouragingly - and with her usual pep.
She lets out a soft yelp of surprise as the ship shakes once more.