"Great great, now if you can get the door open before the...," Junebug hissed as a plasma bolt blew a chunk of earth the size of a dinner plate into glowing fragments of magma. At the temperature of plasma everything burned and the earth sparkled as its trace elements burned off and cooled into slivers of volcanic glass. 

"Terrans catch up," she concluded and raised her submachine gun to her shoulder. The slug thrower craked three times in quick succession and she dropped back into cover. The hatch seemed to be located in a floodway, a small tributary that fed one of the larger rivers only when it was swollen with fresh rain. The silvery surface of the hatch must have once been underground but the slow erosion of soil had revealed it to Drake. The same erosion gave Junebug a narrow trench to crouch in as the Terran return fire hissed over her head, treating her to fresh showers of burning debris.

Drake waved his hand in front of the panel and to his evident delight a series of flowing glyphs appeared in the air like holograms. The stuttered in and out of existence but were clearly visible.

"Hostile units, this is your one and only chance to surrender," a voice buzzed in Junebug's ear. They must be blasting a general frequency call and her mastoid was picking it up. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Drake touching the holograms in sequence. Another near miss dumped burning leaf mulch onto her smoke curling up from her ceramic body armor.

"Hold your fire, we are coming out," she responded. Neil looked at her in shock but she merely shook her head. Drake triumphantly hit the last rune in the sequence. Nothing happened and there was a moment of awkward silence as the Terran fire slackened. Drake's face fell like a puppy that has been kicked.

"Come out with your hands up!" called a voice, tinny and metallic through a helmet speaker. The door panel wavered and dissapeared. It didn't retract or open, it just simply wasn't there. Behind it stood a long tunnel plated in what looked like tarnished silver. It smelled like old antiseptics.

"In!" Sayeeda ordered and shoved Drake through the opening.

"Close the..." but the younger man was already on it mashing a similar sequence of rooms. A Terran in body armor burst over the rim of the ditch and pointed a military issue mob gun at them. In an instant he fired and the door wavered back into existance. The tunnel fell into darkness and there was a clanging noise like a rain of supersonic ball bearings.

"Really hoping they can't get that door open," Junebug observed dryly. 

[@POOHEAD189]