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

Instead of joining the urgent yelling of the rest of the squad, the odd man out lifted their shield. It simply wouldn't do to join the cacophony of the other Marines. No, other options were available. A Sniper. The ground had been littered with the metallic cadavers of Militants. The area was a relatively open zone. Why hadn't she guessed it sooner? No time to dwell or curse hindsight.

Finding their attacker was a logical step. Concealing themselves from their fire another. Whatever. Plotting the trajectory of the rounds that had struck her new found comrades would be difficult. Even if paying attention had been an option. "Don't just scream and duck for cover!" admonishing the two over the squad net while her HUD switched from normal to a combination of the Monoeye's various scanning options.

"Use your onboard systems to try and triangulate where the shots were fired from." leg pods opened; releasing a quartet of miniaturized ordinance around the group. Explosive pops answering the silence as thick gouts of smoke gushed into roiling clouds of grey. "Move damn it! Don't stick to one place while the smoke's up!"

Stripe was caught off guard as the Sniper opened fire and was reduced to a pathetic scramble for cover. He quickly thought over the situation as everyone scrambled about and suddenly had a rather uneasy realization, then a much happier one.

"So," he stated over the comms- wouldn't do to have his voice announce his ideas for the Sniper to hear, after all. 'good news is I do have a LAOW to blow him up, bad news is that if he left those Militants here he could reactivate them while we're distracted. Who wants to make sure they stay down?"

With that, he yet again scrambled for cover once the smokes had obscured the hallway, taking a few pot shots down the hall as he did so.


Why did he decide to join the Marines again, he thought bitingly.

Here, walking amongst the still statues, some scatted on the floor, some still standing, Ylfa listened to what her squad had to say.

"Yes, I can see they're offline," the woman replied, a little irked. "Hell if I know why." It wasn't a good sign. Yes, this could be an ambush, but, any sensible opponent would just destroy them as they proceeded. It wasn't worth the gamble. Was it some sort of networking problem perhaps? She wished Kelly was here for her to ask, but she just wasn't here anymore. As the squad entered what looked like a staging area, the crack of several rifle shots could be heard - Ylfa's CPU fired up at breakneck speed, and did the best thing she could think of. Raising an armored arm, she immediately guarded her head as her suit sensors tried to get a lock.

She didn't give them orders when she should have and only looked after herself. If only for the moment.

"Stay focused! It's a high caliber rifle, not an anti-armor weapon," she almost snapped at them. Truth was, Ylfa was angry. Not at her squadmates, some of whom were uncomfortably boot. Not the sniper for being a sniper. No, she was angry at herself. She should have thought of something, ordered the rest of the squad, but she didn't. Yuriko did instead. She had no time to mope however. Thinking fast, she went through the options they had on the table. She wanted to just hose down and suppress the enemy with her rifle, or even take up Stripe's offer with the launcher tube he had with him. But, one thing stood out at the forefront of her mind.

"No explosives, and watch the gunfire - you all know our orders. We want a capture, and alive if possible. Kill if it's to save your own hide, but if we don't catch one now, it's more marines dead down the line, you hear me?!" the big blonde rallied them. "Protect your head and joints - shield bearers up front, the rest of us will move in behind you, and fast!" she finally ordered them.

Ylfa just hoped they didn't realize their shields were down. Or that their sensors were giving them jack and shit.

Through the headset, Shadow could hear them screaming at each other, even though they were all the way across the staging field, and it seemed satisfactory.

The Shadow kept a mental count of their ammunition, even as they pulled the trigger again. Even the rifle’s kick against Shadow’s shoulder felt satisfying. Despite the deadly nature of this adventure, it felt somehow liberating to be in combat again, after so long.

Someone’s minigun, who had run out in front of the smoke before it could cover them, suffered what Shadow imagined had to be something like a belt feed error. In reality, through the powerful scope, Shadow guessed that she had shot its loader mechanism to pieces.

This rifle might not be able to penetrate their armors, that was true. Their weapons…

Three.

Another copper casing spent. The Shadow collected this one, too, with the metal hand, and pocketed it. It would be reloaded later.

Just a little further.

“Jerry,” Shadow said into the headset. “Ears on, they’re coming. Second range marker, first row. I’ll say when.”




Some advanced, some didn’t; there were no ditches to huddle beneath, and so Jamie and Alec scrambled behind their respective deactivated militants. They were not very good cover.

Smoke slowly spread out from its origin; level-headed veteran Yuriko had done the best she could, and it might have saved their lives. Though the sniper’s gun barked again, it was only aimed at Richard, who had jumped in front to shield the others with his body and his metallic bastion.

For all his trouble, he lost his minigun; for a split second, he spied the violent path of the high-caliber bullet, like a bee that he couldn't find again after blinking. Then, the minigun’s action tore apart into metal splinters, the armor-piercing round lodging itself deep into the weapon. It would not fire again, and little as he knew about engineering or machinery, he dare not try.

As he stood there with his shield upraised, with the smoke siphoning out behind him, totally vulnerable, he had nowhere else to look… but at the militants.

For a moment he might have thought his eyes were deceiving him – it seemed such a random thing to focus on – but then he knew. He saw the little actuator light and he KNEW.

That was a Funky City Special.

Some of the Militants were rigged to explode.

Even as the others were starting to take note, Sawyer would have seen the way the carcasses of old Militants were set up as ranging stakes and would have dove for cover as soon as the very first round cracked out to slam into one of the others' monoeyes. As he hit the deck and took cover behind his heavy shield, his fusion assisted railgun set into the cut out of his heavy shield as he scanned the area and worked to triangulate the location that the rounds from the sniper had come from, his own innate senses of sniping taking over as he looked at the way the area was planned out for this ambush. As he caught sight of the actuator lights on some of the deactivated Militants, he'd send out over the comms in a strangely cold and calm voice.

"We have a problem, some of these deactivated chunks of metal are IEDs, I'm concerned that if they set them off and we're in close proximity that we'll have a problem. Permission requested to activate Noisemaker jamming system."

Jaime exhaled and raised his rifle around the corner and begin to lay suppressive fire towards the general direction he had been shot with, keeping his rifle close to the wall making it a smaller target. He grit his teeth and cursed himself for being a coward and continued suppressing. He still had about 12 mini-missiles combined in his calves. He continued to output fire when he heard the IED call and began to look for cover in the room, prepping his jets if he needed to. His railgun began to search for movement in the room as Jaime regained his senses.

The ringing in Alec's ears eventually died down and the yelling of orders flooded in to fill the void. He slowly climbed his way back up to his feet and started shooting at what he assumed the rest of the squad was shooting at as seemed to be readying his push/pull system to move forward quickly. Then IEDs were spotted, and everything felt like it was closing in around him. He quickly looked at the militants around, trying to spot if any were rigged to blow he considered his options.

Richard reflexively dropped his minigun when the round pierced through and quickly pulled out his LSP, keeping his shield forward, not wanting to give the sniper a chance. The militants were more than a little concerning however and he fell back to the group, using the half of his Push/Pull system that he still had to try and push a few militants back gently. He didn't know his engineering too well, but he did recognize that one. "Damn it where did Freespacers get Nepleslian IEDs!?"

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.



[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.


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 near 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.

Shit this isn't working. Jaime rammed himself back into cover just when the sound from the shot rang up through his ears. He inhaled and checked his ammo and before he could speak the explosion rocked his ears and light pierced his eyes. His curse was muted by the sound, but he shocked himself clear and rocketed back towards the front-center of the formation and ducked behind Sawyer,

"There is a piece of cover about a hundred feet ahead, I don't know if we should enter the kill zone though."

Ylfa moved right behind Sawyer and took cover; she knew exactly what to do when a sniper was around, but did her squad? Even then, something wasn't right, and it was throwing them for a loop. But to make matters worse, just what was she supposed to tell her squad? This wasn't something clear and easy - she felt like a cat got her tongue!

Swallowing once, she cleared her voice before cuing her comms.

"Forget about the cover Jaime. Everyone, stop the advance and group up! We need a shield wall - everyone else, behind them!" Even with all her processing power, her mind was still born from flesh. She merely adopted cybernetics. She wasn't born in them, molded by them, and it showed. Right now, it was the only thing she could think of to form a strong, safe center for the others to rally behind. "Listen up. Even if they shoot out all our guns, we still have our suit lasers and backup SMGs. As long as those Militants don't activate again, we're gold," Ylfa tried to reassure them. It was so much easier to just look after herself, and nobody else. Hearing them all speak though, reminded her why she liked having a squad, rather than going it alone. "It's not like we got IEDs patented Richie!" Ylfa poked at him to lighten up the mood. She knew she was putting a lot of pressure on the shield bearers, and the smallest bit of weight off them mattered. "We're going to do an Elysian tactic - a testudo. Move up nice and slow, and frag the IEDs with some shots as we go. Hear me?" She then cued her suit comms.

"Come out with your hands up, and nobody gets hurt - command wants you alive! But if you don't, we'll pound your face in with our fists if we got to! You hear me?" Ylfa shouted over her suit speakers.

She could already feel herself under the sniper's scope. But at least it wasn't her marines.

With a hiss of frustration, Yuriko rode the recoil of the impact. Her Hostile planting an armored boot back to steady itself. Sucking on her teeth, the Sergent all but had given up hope on these people being able to pin down the sniper fire. Everyone was just blindly firing in every direction! Muttering a colorful string of words she angled her shield for better cover as they began getting into formation.

"Fire came in off my left," forewarning them as she began to fall in formation herself. Let the suit build the trajectory the round had come in from while she watched the de-activated automatons.

Jaime turned to Ylfa as she arrived and nodded, and as he went to lift for a quick look above Sawyer's shield, he hit the shield of his own that he had picked up earlier. He mentally cursed himself and he pulled it out and attached it roughly to his left arm so he could still fire his weapon then took a rough stance next to Sawyer and Yuriko. Giving a thumbs-up to Ylfa and a smile behind his helmet before looking forward again ready to step off in the testudo. It had been a while since he used a shield in actual combat but he began to remember as he fixed his footing.

Yuriko’s suit built a fairly nice looking trajectory, off to the right hand side. It estimated that the sniper was on the 1st level of the far observation tower, and that she was using a. . . .22 caliber bullet?

That had to be straight up bullshit.

It was like her computer was just generating random numbers to throw at her.
The rest of them began to fall into the rough testudo. Due to the relative lack of training in this formation, it was not the best that it could have been, and several people jostled for position. But all that stupid marching bullshit they had been taught in Nepleslian boot camp saw them form into something that at least resembled the unit, with Sawyer, who understood the concept, and Yuriko, who was frankly overqualified for this, forming the centerpieces. Though the formation ended up being impressive, the number of shields between them only allowed a row of three, with one or two protecting their heads.

Effectively blind, Alec had to be assisted.

As they were performing the turtle-shuffle, a distorted, radio voice from a nearby militant asked, “S͢o̧,͏ I h̵av͝e ͠got yo͝u͏r͝ ͟att͏en͠t͜i̷on?”

Sawyer would mutter to himself in his armor "Well isn't this a turn for the weird, we're going back to old as shit tactics it seems, but at least we have the weapons to make this work."

Even as he muttered though, he'd set his heavy shield in place, lifting it into position to lock with Yuriko's and to only reveal the very least section of his monoeye from his armored form. Meanwhile, his railgun would still be sticking out through the gap he'd made in the shield, allowing him to utilize it as a riot shield like brace for the weapon as he analyzed in his own head where the sniper fire had been coming from and turned on his own jamming field, he was tired of the radio frequency fuckery going on and decided to play his own game, setting the system to cycle the frequencies every few seconds while ensuring that encrypted comms between the team was kept online utilizing yet another old method, using his laser defense systems almost as primitive morse code signaling devices, using the light lasers to essentially do the dot dash code on the other members' armor.

The darkness that now consumed Alec's view seemed to calm him somewhat. The lack of awareness seemed to relieve him of a lot burdens in his mind, perhaps if he could just stay still and wait this out...

Then he felt someone grab and drag him towards what he thought were the others in the squad. At least he hoped so. He didn't want to grope around at the moment to see so mentally crossed fingers. He felt everyone shuffle around him and tried to follow suit for the time, occasionally stepping on someone's foot as what calm he received from his few seconds of rest quickly faded into fear he the realization that he was blind duck being hunted by a sniper. "Guys, I can't see FUCKING ANYTHING IN THIS."

"Roger that, bringing out my shield." Stripe tiredly affirmed as a moved into position, with a tinge of annoyance to his tone. Annoyance which was only infuriated by their enemies message. "Great. Next they'll be asking us if we would like some tea."

After falling into formation and detaching his shield so he can hold it in hand to properly control it, Richard spoke up, more than a little annoyance in his voice. "Really wishing it was patented or something right now." He couldn't see too well in front of him in formation, but he kept his attention mainly on the militants, looking for signs of IEDs and ready to disable them the Nepleslian way, blow them up before they were in range. "I have never wanted to hit something more than I do right now."

"Damn straight you have our attention! My soldiers want to strangle you instead of taking you into custody now!" Ylfa replied to their opponent. "Nobody loves you, you Sniper!"

The way she said it, it almost sounded like a racial slur.

"So the sooner you come out, the better, because the longer this is drawn out and the more you keep plinking at us, the less of you is coming back in one piece!" Nothing made sense.The sniper was all over the place; in fact, the marines couldn't even see the shooter. On top of that, the marines heard the shot in one place, while the bullet would come in from somewhere else. And the caliber was a...a .22 LR? Ylfa felt completely and utterly pissed off it took so much at once to trip off her Bullshit Detector. "Alec, stay low behind the others and hold still!" Pulling him to the rear he could soon feel his seals hiss as she took the damaged helmet off his head, Ylfa doing the very same as he did so.

They saw what none of the others could; a singing, shining, humming sword came slashing down right at their faces, its eyeless wielder giggling with glee.

It was their target; a Cyber Neko.

The Shadow lifted their head from the scope to grab their binoculars and survey, in broader terms, what happened on the ground.

“Jerry,” she muttered to herself, “You’re calling -me- stupid…? YOU HAD ONE JOB, JERRY!”

It felt, for a moment, as though her legs had been cut off at her spine. An empty, tingly feeling. She began to elbow back from her emplacement. Slowly, Shadow came to her knees, and then slowly again, stood up, catching the longrifle’s stock beneath her arm to manage the length as her mind raced. Shadow steadied her breathing.

She's going to actually kill them.

Shadow reached up and cued herself into their PA's. "Take off your helmets!" she yelled at them, "You've been hacked. She's going to-"

A sudden shock jolted her ear and she ripped the earpiece off before it could fry. She held it in her metal hand, feeling nothing as the whole assembly began to produce tinny, grayish smoke.

“Fuck,” she whispered. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

Shadow tested her legs, crouching halfways, and then stood again. She could feel the suit’s supports. Now she would just have to test them.

Shadow took off at a run, eyeballing the distance between her outcropping and the edge of the broken ceiling she had used to get all the way up here. She needed another angle on this.

At the last second she kicked off from the edge; anyone watching her, at that moment, might have seen the heat waver as the cloak fluttered around her, as her armor’s coating almost flat out gave up on her. It wouldn’t matter. The people on the ground had something else to worry about just now than Shadow's sick airtime.

The ground is pretty far down.

Shadow felt weightless for a moment before she landed solidly on the other side and her boots found traction. Trotting down to steady herself, she nearly fell right off the next edge before getting her balance back. Grasping the rope she'd tied here, Shadow swung the rifle over her shoulder. No sense in stealth, anymore. She had to get to the controls.