The bullets skidded around
Shadow, but missed her completely – in fact, by several levels of elevation. One stray came comparatively near, but Shadow only knew that by the small of burning metal. The NAM gear shot discs of angry, armor-eating scrap, and it smelled a lot like blood to her. But, suppressive fire only worked when people were willing to flinch, and Shadow had positioned herself behind something thick, heavy, and high.
The sniper watched a marine firing wildly through the scope, seeing all the little fireflies in the gloom that indicated weapons were being discharged. Listening to their radio com between the gunshots had become a little harder beneath the pulse of automatic weapons fire, but she paused to try to figure out what they were saying.
Ah. So they know about the bombs.
Keeping nervous breathing steady, she picked another target, wondering at how the Marines had even made it this far into the base. A few of the marines had chose to keep their heads down, and Shadow figured that was fine.
Keep panicking.
But who next?
“You can blow it now,” she told Jerry.
The giggle on the other side of the radio made her regret the choice of wording.
On the ground…
[Sawyer] sighted down his railgun, and realized, probably with some frustration, that he could hardly spy out any likely positions for the sniper through the ever-increasing veil of smoke that Yuriko had dropped to give he and his fellows cover. A double edged… err, double sided shield. A shield that defended both ways? Anyway, he would at least need to exit the smoke to make any more guesses in the darkness and artificial fog, but he could reasonably tell some things;
The first thing was, as he had already noted, that the sniper had been given time to prepare. IED’s, a firm killzone, and he could remember that he had spied ample cover on the far side of the staging area. The sniper was at elevation – had to be, to shoot over the shield at this angle. His HUD, for some reason, wasn’t giving him accurate readings for distance or trajectory, however; when the gun barked again, he thought he might have seen a muzzle flash, but it had come from a port on the second floor and not where he might have guessed. It looked convincing, but the angle was totally wrong.
He had to blink a few times. It didn’t make sense.
Jamie fired as heroically as he could, until he heard rather than saw another bullet speed out of the fog to strike at someone. He didn’t see who. All he knew is that they were close, based on the sound, though he hadn't seen any gunshots from beyond the veil.
The closest thing to “cover” was somewhere near a hundred meters in front of him, where a blast had shattered part of the floor into an upward-angled wedge. If he could make the dash, he might be able to find some sort of relief from the sniper fire. Those were his orders, anyway; Ylfa had screamed them
fairly loudly.
Problem was, that was outside the smoke cover…
Through a minefield…
Ulp.
Yuriko was in a good enough position, around the middle of the squad’s sudden and hasty formation, that she could see the angle of their fire.
It was all over the place.
How could
everyone be firing in different directions?
She heard the rifle firing from somewhere to her left, but when she turned her head, the impact of the high-caliber bullet caught her in her other shoulder, taking a puff of armor chips with it as it zinged off of her Hostile.
Stripe saw it too, even hunched down as he was. They were throwing lead downwind, but they weren’t hitting anything, and they weren’t even aiming at the same targets.
Then there was a howl and roar of fire.
And as far as
Richard was concerned, the question of where they had got them seemed moot, as a few seconds after pushing upon them, they had exploded. However, he got his shield up in time, and the machine parts didn't harm him in the least bit. Apparently only a few of them had been rigged, and they had been scattered in with the deactivated militants.
Mark noticed this as well; a thin wire that seemed to travel from one to another, and they exploded in chains. He appreciated this because he got to watch the several split-second detonations before one of them exploded nearly right beneath his feet, rocking him.
One went off nea
r Alec, lodging angry bits of deactivated machine into his already damaged HUD and riddling his armor’s right side with angry, livid welts and scarring. As far as his already-damaged helmet, it popped offline completely, leaving his head safe but his eyes in blackness.
Ylfa felt the burning wind from one of the militants exploding just behind her; shrapnel caught her full in the back and came dangerously close to damaging her. Her armor held up, however, and a quick systems check confirmed that, in reality, the bombs might be more annoyance than anything else.
As the smoke began to be less concentrated and more further spread out, they looked with fresh eyes upon the parade grounds in front of them, littered with deactivated militants, with the observation deck looming on the far side like a cloaked, glasses-wearing chessplayer lording it over a gameboard.
And it was their move.
