RP: NSS Sledge Mama Ep. 5.5 - I Hear You Like Cats?

"Thanks for the map, let's take the route that doesn't lead directly to your objective- may be guarded, booby trapped or worse of all, sealed off, trapping us to be picked off at their leisure." He said absent mindededly, examining the map closely and taking a few pictures he could pull up on his HUD.

"Oh, who's best at booby traps? Just because we won't be here doesn't mean we can't leave a nasty surprise to bog them down."

Sawyer would shrug as he heard the one speaking and raised a heavily armored hand. "That would probably be myself, I think I'm the lone graduate of Sapper school here. So I'll hunt up some demo to make use of to set some traps for the blasted mechanized contraptions that are here."

As he said that, he turned his Aggressor suit back to look into the pile of stuff that the Sledge Mama had sent down to them and began looking for explosives, trip wires, proximity sensors and detonators.

Richard made his way down from the control room to get himself situated. He already had a fairly large shield mounted on his shoulder, but a little more couldn't hurt, it seemed like the Hostile was handling the weight fine so he switched out the medium shield for one of the larger shields and then checked to make sure the ammo for the mini gun was fine and wouldn't jam. Once all that was done he made his way over to Kelly who seemed to be examining the scrap of the Militants. "Are you thinking about after market parts again? I'm not really one to talk on body augments but if you want it just get it. Just don't give yourself anything like fangs or an evil voice, then people will get worried."

Stripe discovered that duct tape solves everything as he attached a mini-missile speedloader into the inside of his shield.

"Yeah, that's the plan, but they haven't started cutting yet," Ylfa replied to him. It was odd - she saw them try and take on Yuriko head to head with plasma blades, so they definitely had them. So, for what reason weren't they trying to cut through and simply repel all the marines? As Sawyer readied up in his loader, her Hostile gave him an armored thumbs up. Jaime had a good idea though. If they weren't Nepleslians. "Marine, you're not gonna see me do a cat impersonation and go through vents, plus, some of the tighter squeezes are out of the question," she commented. It looked like the Sledge Mama wanted them to do something straightforward, but, that wasn't the safest thing to do. Though, the Aggressor did tip the balance in their favor, and she couldn't fault Alec's enthusiasm. "That's last resort though. We don't want to kill the target, who or whatever it is," Ylfa explained to him.

She sighed.

"At least you made it further than us though Sergeant." Yuriko managed to get her hands on mapping data, even if it was somewhat shallow. "We got shoved back into our landing craft and blown into space." Looking at the map though, she saw what she was looking for. "This route here good enough for you Stripe?" Ylfa sarcastically asked the young man. Looking at the display, they could see that the main hallway coming from the hanger angled towards where they originally landed at. A storage area full of the things. "It branches off at several points, and this one here," the squad leader pointed to one further along the line, "Looks like it leads elsewhere deeper in the base itself. We're going to push with Sawyer's bad boy, then collapse the hall there before peeling off. Might have to ditch it at that point though." As Sawyer rummaged, Kelly walked over and swatted away his huge, armored hands.

"He doesn't need those for the mini-missiles," the Freespacer AI told him ."He just needs to plug at least one missile into his suit, then program it how he likes. After that, they're good to go. Just needs to use his fathead, that's all." Reaching into the box, her smaller Hostile hands helped Sawyer pull out a good reel of detcord and detonators. "These, for everything else." Something was bothering her though, and she was still cradling one of the Super Militants' heads in her hands, its casing cracked open. Turning, she looked over the rest of the squad. "Bosslady! Hey, this might be important," Kelly tried to catch their attention. Taking off her helmet and setting it to the side, she then removed her faceplate, exposing a compound mono-eye underneath. It glided over a metal mesh and moved out of the way for them to see; not one bit of it looked like it was made in a human's image. "Look at our processor cores and memory banks - we're practically related. These things, they're sapient. I think they need to improve the fuzzy logic tree algorithms and - "

She stopped mid-sentence. There was a faint hiss. Turning their heads, they could see the blast doors were starting to glow a dull red. Kelly quickly put her pieces back on along with her helmet.

"I don't know what that means, but I shouldn't need to say this. Get into position," Ylfa coldly spoke.

Stripe quickly found some cover and readied the Mini-Missile Speed Loader, aiming for the door. "Is the door booby trapped or did we not have enough time?" Stripe asked as he then readied his Shoulder Railgun and other weapons.

"We still got time!" Ylfa quickly replied to him. The glow had only begun and hadn't even spread across the edges yet. "Do whatever it is you're planning and take cover!"

While the shouting and hurrying continued, Yuriko's Hostile strolled along toward the shields. Picking one at random, the power armor glanced toward the glowing incandescence growing upon the door. The woman let forth an audible sigh of exasperation, helmeted head then glancing toward the others. Booby trapping and taking cover? Shield clutched in nanomuscle enhanced grip, the Hostile crouched, calf-thrusters popping out as it launched itself into the air. Gravitic engines kicking in, the armor reoriented itself, calf-thrusters switching off as her armor reached its destination.

Back against the ceiling thanks to the PPG system, Nerimium shield covering fully half of its body, her HPAR angled, her armor began taking on the texture and coloration of the surrounding ceiling. The unit's Brainspammer initiated its Mass Mesher Device, Yuriko going silent over the channel.

In place, the Noisemaker's subsystem promptly came online, ready to sample the enemy transmissions and jam them once ready. Let the others take the brunt, and her sow confusion a bit in the enemy's midst.

Richard stroked his chin as best he could in armor, everyone was thinking of ways to get by and it gave him a bit of an idea. They were in the hangar so there was some good equipment that had to be around. He quickly moved about looking for any tools designed for cutting small ship hulls apart. "If we can't find any short cuts, can't we just make them. The Militants have some kind of energy blades, with those, some hull cutters and maybe plasma torches can't we cut through the walls and the floor? We can use that to try and move around conflict points and get to our destination."

Jaime moved his head in a limbering of the neck movement before aiming his HPAR at the door and slowly walked back towards the cover of the boxes. He flashed his HUD and armed his remaining BOLTs, maybe about a quarter of the maximum load. His voice roughened to a growl of a tone when he spoke, "Come to Me, Men of Old, For The War Now Truly Begins." He stopped just short of the stack of boxes. His plan was to dump his BOLTs down the necks of the Militants, before they could truly attempt to dodge, then use his thrusters to throw himself to ground and open up wide with the HPAR.

He sighed before letting his humor out before the door blow, "Damn, I should have wrote a book."

Stripe quickly threw some mini-missiles in front of the door and prepared to make them blow up via lots of bullets. "You think those will blow them away?" He snarked as he readied himself behind cover.

Alec set up his shield for cover and braced his LAOW on top as he took aim towards the door, ready to convince whatever that wanted to come through that it was a bad idea to come through this way. "Maybe, hopefully we can punch through there guys quicker than having to punch through the walls."

Sawyer would shrug within his Aggressor, loading a cylinder of BLUE rounds into his AOP and aiming his shoulder mounted guns at the doorway, preparing to open fire as the rest of the squad tried to decide which way to go. Hearing Kelly's comment, he'd smirk, walking over to place a set of BOLT missiles in front of the door, set for command detonation for when the door went down.

As the marines raced to their positions, sparks and molten metal splattered onto the floor as the doors were slowly sliced.

"You better leave the scavving to me Richie, but you can do the cutting!" Kelly replied to him. As both Stripe and Sawyer raced back to their positions, the Aggressor's footsteps felt massive and pounding in their bones. Through this, she grumbled at the younger man. "They better, Stripe." If the mini-missiles that they planted didn't work, then that meant that something was horribly wrong in the factory." That concern faded away however; time soon bled away, one second after another as the marines had hurried up, only to wait. During this, Ylfa herself kept oddly quiet, not saying a word. Eventually, all they could hear was the steady hiss of plasma burning through the blast doors, slowly, bit by bit. And then, it stopped.

"Here they come," Ylfa spoke.

With a fiery blast, the thick, heavy slab flew out at them and crashed onto the floor with a thud strong enough to shake them to their core. Yet, plasma bolts were already streaming through the dense smoke, splashing, burning across the hangar. Despite this withering hail, the marines were already on it. Their automatic weapons blazing, Alec's LAOW streaked in first followed by Jaime's mini-missiles; a large blast was quickly followed by a string of antimatter fueled hate, blowing the clouding smoke throughout the now-sealed hangar. Their helmets automatically compensated, cutting through the smoke and outlining everything in their way, but despite all this, they could see it now.

The massive AOP in Sawyer's hands kicked like a mule as it fired its ordinance, the BLUE rounds exploding with a small blast but a large arc of glowing energy which lit up the smoke, turning it blindingly opaque with light. But the chaos didn't stop there; the mini-missiles he left by the entrance streaked off from their resting spot as they were triggered, the spread of explosions setting off another large burst as Stripe's planted set was lit off by the blasts. Despite all of this, six Super Militants sprinted through the chaos, the remains of their allies used as shields as plasma blades burned to life.

They flew in close and fast in pairs, bearing right down on Sawyer, Stripe and Richard!

"Someone suppress the halls! The rest of you, cut those things down!" the Sergeant ordered them about - unless they managed to keep the hall pinned, more and more and more would flood in after this first wave!

Sawyer would target the pair that was coming at him, the plasma chainguns on both shoulders unloading in rapid fire at the oncoming militants, both turrets firing at their maximum cyclic rate as he planted his shield and set the AOP on the inside of it before making use of the fusion assisted railgun that he had as a second weapon to slam rounds down range at the oncoming militants as well, aiming to suppress by volume of fire, he didn't have good targets for the AOP rounds and he had far fewer of them than rounds for the chainguns or the railgun.

With the wrenching of stressed, red hot alloy buckling, the blast door finally gave and flew from its frame. Withering fire from both sides choked the hangar as super-heated liquid metal met ionized superheated plasma. For all they were worth, the Marines seemed hellbent on taking down their enemies. Nestled in safety as she was, Yuriko's Hostile tracked the conflict, easily compensating for smoke and debris. Her HPAR never wavered, following the small group of Super-Militant units as they blazed a trail of death toward the Nepleslian lines from their own littered beachead.

The yells over the CommNet, and steady stuccato crack of weaponry followed now by the whining sputter of plasmic chainguns filling the void.

Hostile still upon the ceiling, and at Ylfa's shout, the HPAR jerked toward the Super-Militant's ingress point. From her perch, the pitched whine of the UMD launcher's superconducting electromagnetic coils powering up was heard only by her over the sounds of battle. The HUD indicator giving her a readout of percentile power increases in the weapon, before it flashed; the UMD fired with a dull WHUMP! The red-striped RED round bounding towards the hall's entrance as the Hostile disengaged its PPG and fell gracefully towards the deck.

The Super-Militant forces engaging the other Marines seemed quite busy. With their forces split, Yuriko's heavy Nerimium tower shield clanged on the deck, firmly in place with a foot and arm bracing. Her HPAR peeking out from behind the protective and impromptu barricade, her own weapon barked as she fired down the hall at the oncoming enemies.

Stripe used the lack of gravity to his advantage, and kicked off to cover further back as he fired away at the Super Militant closest to him until he was forced to switch to melee. "These things just won't give up." he growled, as he aimed his shoulder mount at its 'face' hoping that would at least disorient the bloody thing.

Jaime unleashed hell from his HPAR, and opened up with his shoulder railgun as well. All suppressing the hall with everything he had. The HPAR in his hands grew warm with hate as it spit hot rounds down into the hallway, the railgun punching round after round towards any Super-Militant that dared inch forward from it's cover. It reminded him of wartime, but he couldn't smell the bodies, which was good for a change. It kept his head clear enough to keep lighting up the hallway.

With Kelly now searching Richard advanced slightly towards the soon to be breech, lining up a clear path. Once they big break through though he was surprised to see so many super militants come out first thing, but he had a solution. He put his shoulder mounted shield in front and pulled the trigger on the mini gun her carried, letting a stream of bullets fly at the two rushing towards him. He had to keep the spread somewhat narrow but with this he could fire on his would be attackers and right through them towards the hall to keep more form coming in.

Alec wasn't going to waste any time admiring his handiwork as the LAOW shot out towards the militants. By the time he could feel the impact from LAOW striking something, he was already up and firing off shots with his HP-DMR over his shield. He could feel his heart racing from all the combat but these militants weren't keen on letting him catch his breath. He pushed forward a paces with his shield up to help put some more shots down the hallway and draw some attention away from Sawyer, Stripe and Richard.

Having arrived with the other marines that fled back down the with his tail between his legs Mark was more than a little surprised to see Ylfa and the gang here to aid them.

Mark got behind the nearest bit of cover he could when the door came in but was forced to pivot on his heels as he brought his weapon to bear on the pair looking to have a helluva time with Stripe. Aiming center mass on the closest one of the two he fired burst after burst at the thing.

"Sar'ent we really need to quit meeting like this," he said, his words being accompanied by the same ol' smirk Mark liked to give so much.