Clusterfrag

Max grunts as the Legion soldiers drop all around him in a sudden hurry-- the actions precipitating their demises almost too fast to track with his keen eyes. Swinging his weapon to the final enemy as he works toward flushing out Val and Doc, Max fires two shots which he hopes will be final.

Max's first slug detonates a monitor, which blossoms like a plastic and glass onion under the impact.
The second slug bounces off of the workstation and severs a power conduit on the wall, which convulses like an angry serpent, spraying sparks in all directions.

The Rifleman maneuvers past the final workstation, effectively flanking Val and Doc.

He lowers the SPAS-22 and fires at Val.
Despite the searing pain threatening to overtake his combat senses, Val manages a clumsy roll just as the workstation behind him tears apart from the shotgun blast.

((I'm specialized in combat spells now, so my manabolt should have had another +2DP))

Whirling from the disintegrated mage, Tyros leaps (charge) at the last remaining enemy and burries six feet of steel in his flesh.

[ 6P DAMAGE ]

The Rifleman jerks back as the claymore swings down, avoiding a fatal blow, but still receiving a serious one. A gout of blood oozes between separated armor plates as the blade passes through.

Marlowe clatters to the ground as the weapon falls freely from Max's hands, its payload exhausted in the course of the firefight. Max moves on impulse and adrenaline, his nimble legs pumping hard and propelling him toward the last man standing-- el ultimo hombre, as Val might call him. Sparks rain down all around the remaining combatants, and the air is thick with gun smoke and concrete dust. Someplace far away, the alarm blares its continued warning of the impending missile launch. Max's vision goes tunneled, the terminus of which holds his adversary. The elf moves with frightening speed and a grimace of concentration and rage painted across his evermore haggard features. Reaching the soldier, Overstreet pushes his body forward in an attempt to take the man to the ground, the end result of which he intends to be his fingers wrapped tightly around the lightly armored neck of his opponent.

[ 2P DAMAGE ]

Max collides with the Rifleman and can feel the tell-tale cracking of ribs underneath the blow, but fails to knock the burly enforcer over.

Max collides with the man and feels a pang of satisfaction at the crack of his bones beneath the armor plating of his Legion costume. The elf has a moment to look in the man's eyes before the report of Doc's rifle rings out behind him. The elf blinks in startled surprise at the loud crack, opening his eyes to what appears to be the world running in slow motion.

Doc turns his rifle toward the man who had been stalking him over the course of the short engagement. As Max knocks the soldier away with his blow, Doc sees his opening and fires.

[ 13P DAMAGE ]

The sheer force of the battle rifle's rounds cause the Rifleman's helmet to explode into several pieces, spraying Tyros and Max with blood, shrapnel and gray matter.

(( Combat's over. ))

"Primary ignition in three minutes and thirty seconds."

"Frag!"

Val's expletive splits the sudden silence like a thunderclap on a still autumn night. Half-successfully repressing a cry of pain, he gets to his feet and struggles toward the main control console. One hand clutches the wound in his side, the other grasps various workstations in an attempt to support his suddenly cumbersome weight.

One hand for myself and one hand for the ship. He chuckles grimly through the pain, his mind a bit too addled to realize the thought doesn't make any sense to begin with.

Wincing as he polps into the high-backed operator's chair, he begins searching the main console for nodes or other, more mechanical means at accessing the launch controls.

Val's pain-riddled brain struggles to identify the necessary components for manual operation. There appears to be a pair of biometric palm scanners; devices which--in theory--need to be activated simultaneously. These will need to be physically bypassed. A cipher display rests in the center of the panel, just above a large red push-button covered in a perspex cube. Theoretically, an encrypted code sequence would need to be punched in after the biometric authentication, which would then activate the launch cancellation button.

Pulling his sequencer from his vest pouch, Val glances over his shoulder at the bodies of the Legion squad scattered among the bloodied members of his own team. He hopes at least two of them rank high enough to have abort clearance.

"Pandora, can you tell one Legion rank from another? I need the two most important-looking drekheads here. Hopefully they'll be enough."

Val pauses awkwardly before turning back to the console, his head slightly cocked to one side.

"Well, really I just need their right hands."

Doc's hearing returns, the alarm klaxon pounding against his skull like an aftershock from the gunfire.

The team is in worse shape than he's ever seen them. Val works furiously at a console despite the pool of blood forming under his chair, Max has his customary post-battle flesh wound, Sinjin looks like his skeletal structure is about to collapse inside him, and Doc's own shoulder is screaming for his attention.

Frag indeed

Doc gives his own wound a quick shot of nu-skin, before setting up triage for the others.

(( Don't need to use a medkit for my own wound, or Max's. Should Tyros try to heal Sinjin, since he's unaugmented? Either way is fine. ))

Max blinks the afterimage of the explosion of gore out of his eyes. Blood drips from his nose; there are fine chunks of flesh caught in lashes on his right eye. Reality spills back to him with another braying of the initiation warning. The blaring of the room explodes into his awareness as the body before him falls lifelessly to the floor. Max is whirling in a moment of confusion as he gets his bearing on the situation; going from having a man's head explode in one's face to deductive problem solving is not an instantaneous switch no matter how well trained and battle-hardened the subject. Recognizing what's going on, Max runs past Pandora collecting the bodies of the felled Legion soldiers and over to Val, making loose sense of the hoops through which the decker will have to jump to make a go of the task at hand. Rather, Max recognizes the complexity of the hoops as a collective, if not understanding what they are individually. Trying to suppress the concern in his voice and come across with a greater collected calm than he possesses, Max asks,

"What can I do?? What do you need??"

A faint rythmic tapping can be heard from the tangle of limbs and wreckage piled haphazardly in a corner of the confined control room. Sinjin claps one-handedly, his left arm protruding vertically above the flotsam like the flag staff of a bombed out navy cruiser. Acrid black smoke rises from the stack of detritus. A vaporous hiss is emitted as the visor of Sinjins helmet retracts, bleeding pressure to equalize with his environment.

"Nice one, Tyrosthenes. Killed him with that face of yours...*cough*...now we know why you prefer to stay invisible."

A trickle of blood runs from his nose and down the Orcs blunt features, filling his mouth and staining his oversized teeth a gory red. He coughs again, more violently, before spitting up a raunchy blood infused gob of phlegm.

"Anyone bring me a Band-Aid and a lollipop?"

His tone appropriately urgent, Val replies to Max while rummaging through his toolkit.

"Yeah. Help Pandora with the bodies. If we've got two officers here, I'll need the two of you to synchronously activate the biometric stage of the abort sequence."

After removing four tiny star-head screws from the console with slightly shaking hands, Val inserts a pair of non-conductive shims into the bezel surrounding the cipher control panel and gently pries the insert out just enough to expose the wiring beneath. After a thorough if necessarily rushed inspection of the electronics, he attaches a handful of modular leads to the sequencer and clips their ends to various contacts on the back of the keypad. He begins furiously punching preliminary cipher parameters into the sequencer while somewhere in the world, an uncounted number of people all ignorant of their peril are obliviously waiting to die.

Max hurries over to Pandora and begins trying to assess whether any of the bodies belong to officers. Coming to the soldier whose gray matter he currently wears, Max calls out to nobody in particular,

"Good thing it's not a retinal scanner, eh?!"

Tyros lowers his sword after a long pause at the end of the battle. His breathing is very heavy and his mind is reeling with the after effects of channeling so much mana; like that hangover that finally kills you. Yawning in a breath of fresh air, the big troll takes some swaying steps toward Doc and Max.

"I can take care of the less pressing injuries, Doc. You focus your attention on Sinjin and Val, they may be beyond my art to heal right now."

Reaching out one hand to Doc and the other to Max (centering), Tyros quickly channels mana through his weary veins and into theirs, ejecting the bullets and shrapnel from their skin and sinching their flesh together almost as quickly as it took to create the wounds (heal, force of the wounds, first on Doc and then on Max).

Pandora picks up a limp arm disdainfully and looks with doubt at the armored glove with its threatening knuckles.

"I'm fairly certain these guys are just Legion infantry. Commanders seem to have stripes on the shoulders..."

With a dainty sigh, the physical adept produces a carbon-black wakizashi from a thigh sheath and begins tapping at the wrist from different angles, attempting to locate an ideal place to start cutting.

"Not like he needs it anymore."

[ 7P HEALED ]

Doc slips a pair of nitrile gloves over the Phalanx gauntlets and exhales deeply. The team's battle-hardened medic has performed a few miracles in his time and Sinjin's extensive wounds will prove no exception. He runs fingertips over the assorted implements in the MedFast™ medical kit. Syringes, sutures, staples, faux skin, rolls of gauze, packets, solvents are all on display, nestled in foam; they'll all be needed.

Setting the bones are the hard part. Despite the burly adept's tenacity and resistance to pain, survival instinct kicks in and Doc is forced to grapple with the muscular ork while jamming needle-shaped calcium splints into strategic places. Next up are the numerous lacerations, which he tends to with combat-suture. Finally, the resident necromancer wraps up the job with a few artificial tissue infusions, burn spray, and a copious amount of gauze. The medkit is entirely empty when Doc is finished.

[ 4P HEALED ]

Doc picks a number of 7mm parabellum rounds out of the fissures in Val's Phalanx suit. He covers the bullet holes with disinfectant and sprays a topical cauterizing serum over them, wincing as Val shouts out in pain. A quick dose of heavy-duty painkiller and all protests are forgotten.

Tyros' magic makes short work of Max and Doc's flesh wounds.

Pandora approaches Max, holding one of the severed hands like a dead animal.

"I can't figure out how to get the glove off. I hope the biometrics work through the material. Did you, uh... were you successful?"

"Primary ignition in three minutes. Manual override will become unavailable in two minutes."
Val tries to ignore the sudden numbness in his extremities, only vaguely aware that Doc is pumping chemicals into him with a syringe that looks like it was designed for a troll. He wiggles the shims expertly, forcing the bottom of the cipher panel up just enough to swing a pair of needle-nose in. Selecting what he believes to be the data wires, Val jumpers in the battered sequencer.
By an extraordinary (and overdue) stroke of luck, one of the first hundred rotating ciphers in the sequencer's repertoire happens to be the one employed by the cipher panel. A series of digits begin to flash--on the panel and the sequencer in tandem.

Adams packs the remaining medical supplies back in his bag, and breathes out. Although his minor wound is healed, his shoulder still feels stiff; He can't imagine how Sinjin feels.

He turns his attention to the other surgeries being performed by Max and Pandora, and raises an eyebrow.

Max winces at the nasty work and turns his head slightly to the side, locking eyes with Doc as he continues to saw at the wrist with a utility knife never designed for such a grisly task. His nose rumpled in such a way that the elf looks like he's getting a big whiff of dog drek, Max says,

"Kinda takes me back to a simpler time when all we were doing was sneaking aboard superfreighters, you know?"

Pandora glances anxiously at the phantom countdown above her head and then thrusts the disembodied hand in Max's face.

"You ready? We place them on three. One... two..."

As Pandora cycles to three, Max calmly places the hand on the reader-- hoping for a miracle.

Val flips back the perspex cube covering the kill switch, his hand hovering an inch above the slap-pad. His eyes remain locked on the monitor, willing the biometric scanner to clear the input.

The palm reader underneath the gloved hand in Max's grasp lights up green, but the one underneath Pandora's does not. The adept sends Max a questioning look, as if she's done something incorrectly. She withdraws the limp palm and tries again, to no avail.

"Drek! This one isn't working! Val, wasn't it? Can you bypass this manually?"

Tyros growls, "What the frag, looks like we need more hands!"

Sawing is not the way of the claymore. Within a few seconds, Tyros has the remaining multi-handed corpses with their arms outstretched. One hard, but precise, chop of the blade severs each with grizzly efficiency. Picking up the severed hands, they hang limply, floating in mid air as the troll's thick accent floats behind them. "Try these..."

Max looks at the scene with plain horror on his face as a processional of disembodied, still-warm hands float by him. The immediate horror of it mingles with the objective absurdity of the situation, and the elf manages a small laugh that is equal parts nervous and incredulous, commenting inwardly on the ever-unfolding comedy of atrocities that their lives have become.

Pandora tries each severed hand on the palm reader, to no effect. The usually reserved adept growls in frustration.

"Frag!"

She slams her fist down on the scanner, which flashes green. The trio exchange puzzled glances, before Pandora withdraws her hand and looks at it.

"It's the glove, not the hands!"

Moving with much haste, she places her palm against the scanner.