Shooting Stars [IC]
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Shooting Stars [IC]
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Standing in the boat again, AM says to Veljanov “Alex, it will take some time for the revive process, but the autodoc says that you are safe.”
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[Saturday September 10, 2078; Leaky fishing boat, off the coast of Panama]
As nobody had tried to talk her out of it Lily had picked up one of the sleds that hadn’t been butchered for parts and made her way to the side of the boat where slipping in to the water wouldn’t be immediately obvious to their pursuers (assuming they were watching them through some version of magnified vision from their position two kilometres of so to the rear). She was conscious that she would need to dive quickly to avoid the boat’s propellers but sinking was something she was quite adept at.
Ensuring her pistols where properly secured, wouldn’t do to surface without them, she hung the sled over the side and checking to see that her view of their pursuers was obscured slipped back in to the cold waters and immediately plunged down ten meters or so before levelling out.
Orientating herself by the already receding fishing boat she set about to wait for the inflatables to catch up…
***
#48
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“I understand, thank you. I’ll try to relax and sleep a bit until then.” Veljanov replied.
Meanwhile, Lily found herself closing in on the two boats faster than expected. The men on board of the first one had evidently managed to plug the hole quickly enough. And while the fishing boat wasn’t a high speed vessel, it made enough headway that the combined speed of the pursuers and her sled brought them in range within a minute. The powerful onboard motors churned the water behind the boats and made it almost impossible to see anything clearly – except of course for the shadows of the boats that would presently move above her.
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“Thanks for being such a sport about it Alex. “ Rebbeca says, and then strolls around on the ship and quietly asks “So, what did I miss?”
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[Saturday September 10, 2078; Leaky fishing boat, off the coast of Panama]
With a line attaching her to the sled so that she didn’t lose it in the coming struggle, Lily waited until the churning waters above showed her the inflatables were directly above her. Adjusting the buoyancy aid, like a veritable Lady of the Lake, Lily rose quickly to the surface, her head breaking the murky waters with the boats already ahead of her.
The Guardian was already in her hand, her enhanced agility holding it steady despite the bobbing waves and the wake of the outboards that she’d surfaced in.
> Engaging the boats now if you want to do something to distract them…
She quashed the nervous butterflies down hard, just like the VR games, she told herself…nothing to it…
Her smartlink engaged, she allowed it to do the complicated calculations for the bobbing boat and her own position battered by the waves. She lined the shot on the outboard of the nearest boat and sent an armour piercing sabot whispering out, the silenced shot almost inaudible over the general environmental tumult…
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#49
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“Well, Precious, ol’ Al done put a neat little hole in one o’ they blow-up boats, but then they pulled back well out’n rifle range, patched ‘er up, an’ been doggin’ us from about two klicks out ever since. So Lily, she went out ta play submarine, take out they…Hang on there….”
Al went over to the pod where Veljanov was sleeping off his induced-coma-cocktail. “Says she wants a distraction – this’ll give ’em somethin’ ta gawk at.” He and Thorn dragged the pod tot he aft deck, where he tipped it up enough that anyone with field glasses could see what was inside. <<Reckon all eyes is on us now, li’l darlin’.>>
He grinned downrange at the boats with a flamboyant thumbs up, pointed boastfully at his prize, then followed that up with a one-finger salute before laying to pod back horizontal and shifting it back to its former position.
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Rebbeca grins and lifts herself in the air. Her restless mentor accelerates her to slightly over 60km/h as she approaches the boat. Once she is certain that the people on the boat have seen her, a brief moment after her levitation. She activates the ruthenium polymer in her suit to become nearly invisible and modifies her path of approach to not be obvious. She figures, that it is better if they try hard to identify her and obsesses with the sky to notice the incoming threat.
She hopes that whoever is on the boat, is now scanning the sky for some barely visible armored figure. As for Rebbeca, she enjoys the air on her face and the freedom of movement, as she becomes one with her totem.
Spoiler: -
Spoiler:
The silenced round hit – although it was not nearly as silent as she would have wished. One of the man in fullbody armors clearly looked in her direction, already reaching for his rifle, while his three crew mates were looking at the smoking and sputtering onboard motor.
Meanwhile Becky had approached the leading boat – and her plan had worked: She had the attention of the dwarf – which also was now pointing the barrel of some kind of rocket launcher in her general direction. Too late she remembered, that while RP clothing concealed her appearance, it did nothing to hide her heat signature.
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Rebbeca stays close to the waves, slightly above them, and intends to dive inside to avoid a rocket. To further distract them, she takes out her Horizon flying eye with a flash pak and smoke grenades embedded in it and instruct it to move toward the ship at about 30m elevation. The drone is an expensive firework, but if Lilly is disabling the engine it is a worthy sacrifice.
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[Saturday September 10, 2078; In the water, off the coast of Panama]
Doing her best to ignore the fact that one of them had clearly spotted her Lily quickly took aim on the other boat…it was already further off and the angle was more difficult but they were relying on her to disable these boats so they didn’t dog the team all the way back to Panama…
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#50
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Lily had just fired her second shot as the guard in the boat swung his rifle around. Now she recognized it as this weird hybrid assault-sniper rifle that had been widely featured during the Dragon Civil War a few years ago. The water fountained up as the explosive ammo of the salvo broke the surface.
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Al was congratulating himself on yet another application of his not-inconsiderable performing arts capabilities in distracting the Mars freaks from Lily when Becky launched herself off the deck like some sort of caped superhero.
Al cigarette dropped out of his mouth.
“Holy frijoles, Precious, ya been holdin’ out on me, girl…” he muttered to himself.
Satisfied that there was nothing further he could do to influence the distant conflict, he found himself a crate to sit on, detached the scope from his rifle and watched the show (careful never to point the scope at Becky – whom he couldn’t really see anyway, now).
As he watched, he contemplated the elf sleeping in the nearby medical pod. Things were shaping up unusually well. Could it possibly be that Horn was not a diabolical agent of some secret society bent on the destruction of metahumanity, and that Veljanov was not the Bringer of Chaos in elf form, and that they would not suddenly be informed that all of their efforts had foolishly doomed the earth to millennia of fear and horror? Could it be that this was actually an innocent guy who’d gotten kidnapped by a bunch of straight-up freaks and who legitimately needed rescuing….
It was a tempting thought, and everything was starting to point in that direction despite Al’s dogged skepticism.
And why not? Why shouldn’t things occasionally go the way they were supposed to? Why couldn’t they just do an honest job and get paid and go home? Maybe, just maybe, this was that….
Nah. There’d be a catch somewhere….Had to be.
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Al noticed the smoke that suddenly rose from the two boats – and the gunshot sounds that arrived about six seconds later.
Lily managed to dive just in time. She could actually see the bullets as they slowed down and exploded in the water. The boats had stopped and were now no longer propelled forward.
More shots began to get fired, but she was now deep enough that the bullets couldn’t reach her anymore – or at least that they couldn’t harm her.
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<<Nice work, darlin’. They’s dead inna water, so ya can go ahead an’ catch us up now. I’ll have the skipper wait for ya.>>
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Rebbeca returns to the bost and lands on the deck. “That was fun, nice work Lilly.” She said to the team’s channel.
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[Saturday September 10, 2078; In the water, off the coast of Panama]
Lily dove deeper, conscious of the aftershocks of the exploding rounds magnified by the water…at least they were going off near the surface as they likely registered the pressure as being their target… better that than in her! She was pretty sure that she’d accomplished what she set out to do, those engines had looked suitably wrecked, but she couldn’t communicate with the others from the depths and she certainly wasn’t going to surface again in range of that rifle…
Powering up the sled she let it drag her back towards where the fishing boat had last been. Approximately a kilometre downrange of the inflatables she allowed herself to drift back towards the surface. Trying to stay just submerged she sent a message to the others
> I’m pretty sure I disabled the engines…are they still following?
When she was assured they weren’t she returned to the boat as quickly as she could
“Let’s get out of here before they get air support from somewhere!”
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#51
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Air support was indeed a problem. As the boats slowed down more and more, Al could make out a small cloud of drones rising from the boats. It seemed as if their pursuers were ready to play their last trump card. It was hard to make out, but Al was almost certain it would be a dozen and a half – exactly as many as a top of the line Triox Ubermensch could control. At least they didn’t look like anti-grav drones but regular rotor drones.
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Rebbeca grins at Preston >> Presto babe, I know you are weak at cybercombat… but perhaps we can get rid of them with hacking? My deck is not flexible enough for decent cybercombat anyhow. Anything I can do to help?
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Preston grimaced.
* Coleman: They should not be too hard to deal with individually, but numbers can matter in their own way.
* Gamma: They almost certainly have at least a rigger, so they are not quite individual. They could also have a decker with them, although they don’t seem to have hit the ship, last I’d checked.
* Eliza: I’m on a team, I should communicate with them.“Let me get to a secure location to go to hot sim, and I’ll see what is what. It looks like they have a high end Rigger, which makes them harder to target. They could also have a decker. I’ll let you all know how it looks, shortly. Shouldn’t need cybercombat to destroy them, I just need to get them to stop flying for a few seconds — unless they have a brain-dead failsafe for that. If their defenses are passive that will just take some time. If they have more active coverage, well, we’ll see how it goes but it is possible that I won’t get to all of them.”
“All of which is to say, your bow and Al’s rifle may also be answers, if the swarm comes in range. But first, on the matrix side … ”
* Monkey: marking up 18 of them all the way to admin status, then re-booting them? That will take until boredom-come!
* Oleg: Some times doing a job takes hard work
* Monkey: Or sometimes it takes being clever — which feels way better!
* Gamma: That RCC is good enough that wresting control from it may be difficult
* Coleman: The RCC! It is the single point of failure to the whole set-up“Actually my first plan will be to try and find that RCC, mark it up, then spoof commands to the drones to fly into the sea. What you could do matrix side is watch out for a decker. Run silent, use whatever noise reduction you have, and keep doing matrix perception for anyone running silent.”
After that Preston moved into the ship’s cabin, if they let him in, curled up next to a all, and went into hot sim.
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“Do yer thing, Presto baby. Reckon ol’ Al’s gon’ git ta work that old-fashioned way.”
Al set up again. With the boat’s outward motion, the drones weren’t closing super fast. It would be a moment before they hit his range. Once they did, he started firing. He took his time with each shot. The only thing he did quickly was reload his five-round magazine, a task his fingers performed with superhuman dexterity.
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