Corridor
"They're here."
Ilsa stood up from her kneeling position and darted forward flying above the ground as the elevator doors slid open at the farthest end of the corridor. It was a cargo elevator, wide-set with huge doors that admitted an outpouring of barely-armored men into the passage. They opened fire as soon as they saw the Nekovalkyrja blazing towards them, and some of them may have even hit her. Maybe. Ilsa's axe glimmered in the light as she slid through three of them and into the elevator box itself. A series of guttural shrieks escaped afterwords and the men who remained in the elevator were clearly being converted into cooked hamburger by axe and plasma pistol. Those outside the elevator quickly radioed for the call button on the next deck to be pressed and jogged away from the elevator as quickly as they could, diving past Eir and Phase's clearest fire-sectors and into the relative cover of the perpendicular paths in an intersection ahead.
It all happened so fast. At the end of the corridor, the doors to the elevator started to slide shut slowly with Ilsa still inside. A pirate with an axe lodged in his back began to make his last desperate bid for escape, dragging a trail of sticky red wet beneath him as he crawled on his stomach for the door, only to be grasped by the ankle and whipped against the wall of the elevator car with a loud and clear crunch. Ilsa reached up and grasped the hilt of her hatchet, peering at the other two in the hall through the closing elevator doors. While the doors sealed shut at last and the elevator began its ascent, a grenade angled out from behind the right-hand corner of the nearby intersection and bounced off the wall before rolling up softly just in front of Phase and Eir.
Oh shit, there's like another corridor, man.
"They're not here."
Elway's voice cut through the hiss and the smoke in Linda's helmet speakers, just above the distant roar of sudden combat. He was on the opposite end of the darkened corridor, kneeling next to a mauled corpse with his chainshort in hand. Standing, the other marine looked around in every spectrum he could, searching for any means of escape.
"It could be a hidden passage, or a secret elevator." He explained, his slow bootsteps silent despite the heavy weight of his stealth suit. "Do you see anything, Corporal?"
Engine Room
There was nobody there.
It was pretty peaceful in the engine room at this point. The engines were shut off, the ship was running wholly on back-up power, and all the crew men were subdued. Elijah and Halcyone could've set up a picnic and eaten without being molested, and nobody would've been the wiser. From the distance, the soft sputters of Ilsa's plasma pistol reached their ears. So far away, the action was happening. Here in the lovely engine room, though, everything was quiet. Nice, quiet, lovely, and all together boring. There wasn't much more to be said, but Lamb has a word count fixation and he intends to write a great deal about just how nice it was. Looking around, the two of them would be able to tell that the engine room was well-loved by its crewmembers. Before Harmonious Solarsailor had pelted the massive freighter with nuclear fire that hugged the ship with a sudden disturbing electromagnetic pulse, it seemed they'd been mostly relaxing. This was certainly no military engine room. Hammocks were tied along exposed conduit lines jutting out from the floor. A pair of upturned nineteen-liter buckets had been placed on either side of an empty plasma cutter storage crate, on top of which somebody had been really cleaning floor in poker. Chips were now scattered around the crate, and a sandwhich half sat sideways like a leavened pyramid on the tile beneath. A cigar had been extinguished by DCS and a thick, handrolled 'herbal' cigar had been stubbed out in the ashtray next to it. It was pretty homely, I guess.
Spires of Magical Electrons Dancing in The Digital Night
im here
im here waiting for you
you tic toc ass muthafucka
fuk u
Dax had always been good at talking dirty while he worked. And in between each message that blinked into his vision, a terminal shut down. Alistair's field was narrowed, and Daxton must've known he was trapped. In a last ditch attempt to leave it to the meat, Daxton had closed every active terminal one-by-one, and as Alistair's programs zeroed in on the admin terminal, it winked away. The bridge terminal was there, awaiting some noble digital knight to conquer it. It was like a dragon, however, because its command functions had been locked out. Manual override only. It could do nothing to the ship's systems (which had been rendered mostly useless by Halcyone and Elijah's quick work by this point), and likewise nothing could be done to it. The primary console would have to be manually overridden before the ship could be controlled by anybody again-- and before that could happen the entire network would have to be cycled.
Cargo Bay
"So, here we are."
Thonmir leaned on Beep like he was a peice of furniture, watching Alistair work with little interest. He wanted to check the kid out, eyeball him for bodily perfection and search for something to lust after, but the full power armor left most things to the imagination. Finding little pleasure in his imagination, the elf patted Beep twice on the chassis and asked, conversationally, "So, you, eh... You ever let people ride on top of you? Seems like it could be fun."
