Caldera Base, Level 1
Abandoned Hallway
The injured arm fell and Charbon’s hand went to her face, massaging her temples as her bright eyes closed and she sighed in a way that sounded more like a long-winded scoff.
“I’ve worked ceaselessly to avoid suspicion and your crew continues to shoot me down rather than accept mutual aid. Where is your captain? I came to ask that simple question and have answered yours.”
Level 15
“Last time I got into a close quarter with a Mishhu, I had to take a hemo bath after. This time was better. Couldn’t have made that shot without you, Momo,” Hoshi said in a clipped but not impassive tone as she hurried to to appraise where the Mishhu had gripped Rio’s neck. Her dark blue eyes lingered but then looked up at Sahty’s unfamiliar violet eyes and she looked momentarily shaken before she spoke with more certainty than her lingering gaze had displayed.
“Good to hear, Rio. Very few Nitô Hei live to tell the tale after something like that.”
Molli’s comment about hurting in the morning caught the captain’s attention as she pushed past and floated above the dead Mishhu to regroup on Aiko’s position.
“You’re going to be in your old body in the morning.” Hoshi looked to the Nepleslian inhabiting the NMX Neko’s skin and added, “Let the nanomachines work while you hang back; your hemosynthesis is a powerful thing. Make use of it while you’re still with it.”
Hoshi caught Aiko’s words as well as Molli’s and furrowed her brow while taking them both in.
“You were started out on the command level? As an enlisted?” Hoshi questioned as Myga pushed in the numbers to the keypad.
The meaty orifice puckered in a rippling motion that started at its center. Hoshi’s hand flung up as the door unlocked, closing in on Myga’s wrist. She pulled the NMX Neko with her as she fell back to the side of the doorway. Her other hand tucked into Sahty’s waist, pushing her back against the wall next to the door as it opened, too, keeping the three out of sight to whomever was in the CCC. The captain’s eyes looked to the other side of the door where Aiko and Morgana were stacked and through the telepathic link, asked Aiko what was on the other side of the now opened door. In an instant, Aiko relayed her memory into Hoshi’s brain.
What Aiko had seen was a large cavernous room with wires and pulley systems that swung from the ceiling. Some of them connected to what were obviously terminals, but the electronics hung suspended rather than attached to anything below. Volumetric displays floated on their own and glowed bright fuchsia with schematics and readouts creating pink gradients of color, their holograms projected from some unseen source. The terminals and volumetric displays were laid out in a hexagonal pattern close to the center of the room while the wires were fed from the ceiling a bit further towards the wall and the slightly ovular room was likely 150 feet in circumference. A slide edged one corner of the room in a half circle around the sinewy walls, looping around oddly like an MC Escher staircase. Aiko had seen that the combat command center’s floor was nonexistent and instead there was a carpet of lava beneath the Mishhu that worked at the terminals, their tentacles flopping fluidly as they easily held themselves in the air at their workspaces. All of the CCC was underlaid by a broiling pool of dark crimson lava and black magma that cast a red glow to the Mishhuvurthyar workspace above it.
There were no walkways or catwalks or places to stand, but to the left of the wide room was a door that opened (the door that the Kaiyo crewmen would have come through had they entered straight out of the elevator). The Mishhuvurthyar that entered was yelling in Umbral to those other four Advanced Mishhuvurthyar already there. The situation in the room hadn’t felt tense until that moment—no doubt he had just found his dead kin in the elevator nearby—and when he floated in, he took control of the room by directing everyone in that foul psionic language of the enemy. He took a place far from where they were on the other side of the room, close to the door he had come through and near two Mishhu who came to his terminal, as well. The last two held places at terminals near the server room door and stayed there, though one grisly green Mishhu seemed slightly distracted by the server door opening. Half of the eyes on one side of his face directed themselves to the door while the others stayed on his work.
The command center’s heat was already emanating into the server room as the door opened. There was no time to form a plan, now. Instead Hoshi responded to Aiko to make the first move, whatever the Ketsurui believed best.