Penny

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Blood and viscera showered Sayeeda, Neil and the vehicle as the corpse crashed to the ground behind them in a gory pile. In theory the static charge on Sayeeda's faceplate should have kept the fluid from touching it and obscuring her view but there were limits and gobets of bluish blood spattered across the front of her field of vision. Several louder thunks sounded from the back as piece of meat the size of apples pattered over the back of the jeep. Junebug made a half heated effort to sweep the blood from her face shield but it only served to smear the fluid further. Sighing she throttled down slowly before bringing the jeep to a halt and allowing it to settle to the moist sand of the riverbank.

"Well," she said judiciously, picking pices of meat off the passenger seat and tossing them over the side of the vehicle.

"Any one you walk away from I guess," she finished and took her helmet off to free her hair. The things blood already stank, although the smell was both different and more unpleasant than the familiar smell of human death. Whatever the native lifeforms where they clearly used some other substance for oxygen transport, perhaps cobalt or copper, but that apparently didn't stop it from smelling. Climbing out of the jeep she stretched her legs and looked around. They were parked on a broad sandy flat land that probably served as part of the river bed during flood. Here and there creeks, like the one that had come so close to ending thier little joy ride, snaked their way down to the main river, carrying run off from the walls of the valley. Patches of tough greenish yellow grass stuck up like hay in a half cut field and insects, small gnat like things with four sets of wings whirred around.

"Good shooting," she said, somewhat reluctantly, "I hope we dont have to deal with too many more of those things."

Using a shimmy cloth from her cleaning kit she managed to get the blood of her visor and fitted the helmet back onto her head, by chance the thermal overlay was still running.

"Weird..." she said as she caught a glimpse of an oddly dappled pattern at the end of one of the small feeder creeks. It wasn't anything unusual, just a grassy bend in a creek, but there was an odd cross hatching in infa red. Reaching up she toggled the helmet to millimetric radar, the distortion vanished.

"There is something weird at the end of the creek," she explained to a doubtlessly confused Neil.

"Lets check it out, we should probably let the engine cool down on this piece of shit, if we are going to keep it we need to talk about some serious overhalls," she said as they started walking away from the car, its engine still pining with differential cooling.

It was maybe fifty meters down the creek when it finally occured to Sayeeda what they were seeing. Camoflague netting. Not the at the market in millitary surplus stuff either, good stuff, not quite as good as they would have used in the armored but still of very high quality. It was pulled over something nestled in the corner of the creek. Junebug made a cover me gesture with her right arm and unslung her plasma rifle. Bringing the weapon up to her shoulder she moved low and fast across the sand flat to the netting, cranking up the thermal imaging gain just in case. She needn't have bothered.

"Son of a bitch," she said, straightening and relaxing as she looked down into the creek. Reaching down she tore back the netting, almost invisible even this close, to reveal a battered looking land-drifter much like their own. Whoever had left it had clearly taken pains to conceal the fact and he had gotten his hand on military grade disruption netting.

@Penny

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Robotic Voice: Are you checking me out Ma'am?
Me: *cough* Umm, I have to go!

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Oh no, not reasonable behavior! Better start some more drama.

@catchamber

Just luring them in ;)

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

"Well fuck," Junebug said in the calm that only the truly stunned can summon, "You dont see that everyday." The creature, the dragon - they called them the classics for a reason afterall, whipped through the air like a demented kite. The thing didn't have wings perse but rather what Sayeeda though might be a kind of membranous strip that ran from the things armpits down towards its tail. Wasting no further time with xenobiology she rammed the gates open, pouring all the available power she could to the engine. The little jeep rose two hands breath and nearly dumped its air cushion but she caught it in time, angling the blade incidence as close to vertical as she dared. The little jeep bucked forward on a spray of dirt and leaf litter that roostered out thirty meters behind them.

"Fuck," she said again as their speed rose to over a hundred kph, far to fast for anything but paved roads or desperate emergencies. This certainly fit the later category. The little jeep raced towards the river, foliage whipping by like the talons of dead gods. One of them struck Sayeeda a blow that would have knocked her senseless if she wasn't wearing her armored helmet and she felt the thing draw blood from her unarmored neck as it slid from her face-shield. More concerning yet the red which overlay the engine block was deepening as they poured on the coal, the little vehicle wasn't a combat unit and wasn't designed to take this abuse. Still, better the risk of burning out the power train, than the certainty of being torn to shreds by whatever was chasing them. Junebug expertly dodge a large tree bohle that loomed up suddenly and a moment later they were airborne, the ground having fallen away into a stream about twenty feet wide. She dumped the blade incidence almost completely and they still hit the water hard, spraying a ring of dark brown mucky water out in a vast donought before the lift stabilized and shoved them up over the back. Sayeeda was grateful for her armor which probably saved her ribs and neck during the violent maneuver.

"Any fucking day now!" she yelled over her shoulder at Neil, although that was unfair, she couldn't have made the shot with the jeep bouncing over rough terrain like this and she was plenty fucking good. The thing let out a scream that was loud enough to engage the sonic cancellation fields in her helmet and lashed down at them like a thunder bolt. She through the control yoke to the side and narrowly avoided the things talons as they tore plow ruts in the damp earth of the river bank. It recoiled back with a reptilian shriek of rage.

"Goddess damn it," Sayeeda snarled and dumped a quarter of her throttle, "Hold.." She didn't get a chance to finish the sentence as she chopped the incidence again dropping the jeep to the ground with a tooth rattling bang. It bounced and bounced again, the plastic shrieking in protest as the skirts tore a muddy brown scar across the river bank. The maneuver was many times more efficient at scrubbing of velocity than the coupling of ground and pressurized air could be and the creature overshot them for a few seconds. Junebug cranked the incidence enough to lift them again, relieved not to have torn the skirts to ribbons, and the jeep wobbled forward at half its original speed. In front of them the thing coiled around with serpentine grace and rushed back towards them, great fanged maw agape.

@POOHEAD189

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Indeed! It is the ghost of leftist future that gets you.

Somewhat more seriously though, I find it very difficult not to generalize when it comes to conservatives. I've joked before about playing conservative bingo but there is a kernel of truth to it. People run so hard towards my preconceptions sometimes. I guess we could all work harder on evaluating people in their own terms, rather than putting them into boxes.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Extra points if you use a ton of unnecessary verbiage to pad out the argument.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Junebug found it worked best if she considered the land-drifter as a gun jeep. It mounted four fans which compressed air beneath it to lift it a few fingers breath of the ground but lacked the power to weigh ratio for true flight. The fans hadn't been tuned, perhaps ever, and the asynchronous vibration rattled Sayeeda's teeth annoyingly as well as giving the thing a pronounced pull to the left. If she had the time she would have prefered to tune the thing, lest the vibration freeze a bearing and perhaps mount a heavy weapon on a pintle through the roll bar but she didnt believe they could spare the time right now. The thing was made mostly out of a dark green plastic that kept the weight down and made it reasonably resistant to the occasional collisions inevitable in a jungle environment.

The thick green foliage brushed by them at about 40 kph as she followed the curve of a sluggish river east along the valley. The vegetation thinned closer to the river which made the passage along the marshy ground possible. Sayeeda figured that this was the logical route for Ferenhall to have taken as well, although she had yet to see any sign of him. She had shed her flight suit for the excursion and, though she still wore her body armor, wore only a T-shirt, khaki shorts and combat boots in order to make the stifling heat more bearable.

"See anything!?" she called to Neil over the buzz of the fans. She had taken the driving chore for herself, having spent plenty of time driving similar vehicles in her time with the armored. It was possible that Neil might have been the better choice, particularly because it would free her to use weapons, but she didn't fancy spending the afternoon staring into the scanner they had bolted to the passenger side of the dash. Sayeeda still wore her helmet and she was using its thermal imaging mode at a twenty five percent opacity overlay, rending the landscape around her in subtle shades ranging from the cool blue of the water to the hot red of the engine. It was an old trick she had learned in forest warfare that made it more difficult for ambushers to lurk behind the cover of foliage unless they had serious tech to mask their infrared signatures. Sayeeda was much more worried about animals than human ambushes, although thus far all she had seen was a few lazy looking crocodillian type creatures sunning themselves.

"This opens up into a river delta in about six more clicks," she went on, gunning the throttle to keep them airborne as the went over a large muddy creek feeding the river.

"I dont see any settlements marked on the maps but who the fuck knows." She hoped they would find some sign of their quarry before nightfall, although driving that long on this course would take them all the way to the shallow saline ocean several hundred clicks distant.

@POOHEAD189

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

"You know, just once, I'd like to show up somewhere looking for someone and hear. Oh of course Captain he is right over there, let me introduce you," she said with a touch of disgust in her voice. With the flick of a finger she sent another coin spinning across the bar towards the bartender by way of a thank you. One of the alien's bony hands slapped down with enough force to shake dust from the shelves behind him and pocketed the coin. It seemed like improbably good fortune that their target was known personally to the first people she asked but if he was a drinker it made since to spread his tabs around the various establishments.

"Seem's awful convenient that he hops town about the same time we get the contract," she said, idly rolling the remaining liquor around in her glass.

"Whatever tipped off dear old daddy must have given him the intel too," she mused. That was an interesting but not particularly useful piece of information. Either he was tipped off or it was a piece of bad luck, either way he was either dead or out in the jungle somewhere. In either case it behooved her to get out there and verify it it soonest.

"Alright," she said turning to face Neil.

"We are going to need some sort of transport, they dont seem to go for aircars on this benighted mud ball so that means some kind of ground transportation." She wished she had a skimmer and a crew, given the local megafauna a trio of 2 inch plasma guns would be real handy. Still they would have to take their chances.

"Better see if we can scare up some sort of scanner too, something that will help us locate metal debris at a distance. Once that is in place we will load up and head out after our boy."

@POOHEAD189

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Global warming isn't racist, its Just ALT-SealevelHeight.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

I suppose it fits with the Hurricanes are Gods punishment narrative.