The sudden rush of warm stale air into Cray's lungs felt like it had torn something loose down there before he exhaled painfully bringing it back out again, stinking of his unbrushed teeth and of the drugs in his system. For a moment he rolls his tongue over his molars and front incisors wondering what had slept in there while he was out of it and why it had moulted its winter coat. He was tempted to spit out the disgusting taste before the realisation of what he was in managed to hit home through the fog of the exDDG-09 drug still meandering its way through his system. Instead he poked out his tongue to vainly see if it was indeed coated in what felt like a wraithraider's honeymoon bedlinen. Then toggled the HUD button inside the helmet to begin the armour's startup sequence and to administer a shot of stimulants. What he really wanted was a shot of whiskey or maybe even a beer, yes a beer would go down real nice right now, maybe one of those ones like he'd had on Destarphas about 6 months ago.
//startup sequence initiated
+checking ECU.......ok
+checking EEPROMS V98.9.......ok
+checking CPU V-SPEC.....
Cray ignored the rest of the luminous green lettering scrolling across his eyes, the armour would say if it had a problem and let him know in no uncertain terms why it was pissed off at something electronic deciding not to work. Ironically it was those beers he'd had on Destarphas that had gotten him into this particular shit-detail, all 18 or so that he could remember.
"18 beers and a dead mans hanging off a crimson left hand", it sounded like one of the songs his Papa used to listen too in his more lucid moments when the bastard wasn’t dead drunk, hitting him and Ma and generally being a good for nothing waste of skin.
+checking Combat CPU V76.6...ok
+checking NIO interface......ok
+checking CY 001 interface......ok
Still, it could have been worse, though he'd broken his mother’s heart from what he'd done and where he was now. Could be a prison miner on Tyne and didn’t they just love a "purdy lil 'ol Commissioned offi-sar", his sphincter tightened just thinking about it. Not that he was anything much left of his commission now, an SRS-01, Sub-fucking-altern, 2nd Lieutenant. The lowest of the low, he'd lost a full rank and been give the 3 options, death by a bullet to the head, lifetime service in prison and the last exit for the lost, 5 years service in the "We stop Bullets" 7th Light Irregular Regiment, 2nd Battalion.
Five years in "The" worst detail anyone could imagine but if on the odd chance he lived the 5 years they would consider his crimes atoned for and erased from his record. Time to check in on the worthless sacks of shit he'd been given to take along, now that his armour had finally finished its absolutions he checked in on them to see if they where still alive.
Sgt. Kegan Marr, a mildly psychopathic engineer prone to bouts of extreme violence, he was still alive and twitching for what he was worth.
Corporal Gary Thais, recon sniper. Ended up here for screwing the captains wife and then having the gall to tell everyone about it at a function, whilst drunk and calling her a 'dead lay'. He was a good man Gary, just didn’t know when to take a dose of shutthefuck-up.
Private Jrt'kn, Shaktar hand to hand expert, the dickhead lizard had volunteered for this job, something about a family debt. Crazies as a wood grub on a frypan, dumb as a brick for volunteering for this shit.
Private Mack Dett, demolitions expert, busted all the way down from sergeant to private for fragging his CO, no good piece of shit, someone to keep an eye on.
Private Waylon Hoffe, some knife wielding punk kid from Artery with the worst DNA tattoo he'd seen in a long time that said 'Dog Fucker' in black letters across his forehead. Every time Cray thought about that he started laughing, it was hard to talk to Way, he was a nice enough kid but he'd be jiggered if he couldn’t talk to him without smirking. Waylon was probably used to it by now but in his past he hadn’t always been that tolerant.
Flight officer, Ahm Tyrell, well he was dead. Looked like the drugs had stopped his heart. Oh well, one less scumbag to roll grenades into his sleeping bag. The real bugger was that he was the one who was supposed to fly this dropship in...
'ETA to surface in 17 minutes, you punks awake or do I have to kick your arses outa bed"
The following yawns, affirmatives and swearing confirmed that they where more or less ready to do it. "Ok, kids, Ahm's dead so we need the flight crew alive to take it in, otherwise we'll end up in the starport and then we're screwed. Anyone else is a valid target, try not to shoot anything that looks like its important to keeping this flying shitcan in the air."
He gave them time to check the last of their suit diagnostics and then on the count of three all hell broke loose.
It was kind of funny, there was this one poor bastard, just standing there in his Body Blocker, clipboard in one hand, biro in the other and not wearing his helmet. From the look on the guys face he wasn’t sure if he was more scared of the six figures tearing themselves out of the lead lined body bags in the ships hold or the fact that they where about to blow the living shit out of him with guns. Two seconds later the top half of his torso just sort of fell away from the bottom part and the expression didn’t change one bit, Cray suppressed a chuckle and then realised that there where other guys running around in the dropship that probably wouldn’t appreciate the humor. Marr had the shits about something and he and Gary ran howling like banshees up the exit ramp with that awful bloody Scythe machinegun roaring, firing at someone up there who was now busy screaming too.
There was a god, he did not have a sense of humor and he was called supply Sgt Moutlan back at base. Gary had been pissing the guy off for weeks and now Moutlan had the last laugh by giving Gary a MAUL combat shotgun instead of a rifle, at least the shotgun was a lot more use here than a sniper rifle in the close confines of the ship but later they would have to find Gary a rifle.
"You bitches waiting for a signed invite? Get down to engineering and secure the reactor."
Waylon and Jrt'kn bounded off with respective sharp pointy objects in hand down towards the back of the ship.
There was just Mack left in the hold now so he gestured towards the front of the ship with his carbine, "ladies first", he couldn’t tell under the Endeavour armour if Mack was pulling faces but it was a sure bet he was. Besides, he didn’t trust the rat bastard behind him with the TEAR submachinegun, Mack ambled through the hundreds of bags full of corpses leaving a squelching trail of destruction. Some of them made whining, soft crying noises from gas buildup in the stomachs as he trod on them indiscriminately, Cray was just glad that he couldn’t smell the dead militia soldiers and nervously followed the sapper.
He was nearly on the ramp after picking his way through when another crewman appeared from a side door on his left wielding one of those SLA guns with the tough sounding name, Cray vented his bladder, which had seen better days, into the armours catheter system from the fright. The crewer was almost as startled as Cray, upon seeing his black KAD-C clad form walking through the room, raised his submachinegun and began blasting.
This only served to make the flow of urine take on a distinct urgency and Cray found himself in an awkward position of instinctively reaching for his nuts in a futile attempt to stem the geyser whilst being peppered with 10mm HEAP rounds in the head and torso. On pure reflex the carbine came up barking in his right hand spitting rounds into the walls, floor, ceiling and just about everywhere else except the crewer.
The crewer is screaming in either fear, anger or both while Cray grits his teeth from the stinging of the rounds bouncing off him, the torrent in his nether regions making it difficult to aim with one hand. Finally something in Cray's drug addled brain puts it together and he takes the carbine in both hands, the crewer goes down in a hail of 14mm DU rounds and stops screaming.
"You alright back there boss?" Gary asks over a comlink filled intermittently with gunfire.
"Oh, yeah, just peachy." He's 200km above Mort city in a Stingray dropship full of dead militia, the odd live one trying to kill him and he's just pissed himself like a new recruit. The noise from the turbine on his left starts making a dull vibration that he can feel distinctly through the floor, some of the DU rounds have over penetrated and found their way into something vital. He could blame it on Marr and his bloody machinegun except that no one would believe that the damage was 11mm HEAP, "how are you arseholes doing up there?"
"Well, we kinda have control of the flight deck now sir." Cray can hear the sounds of Marr swearing yelling something about "breathe you little bitch!"
"Umm, looks like the flight crews kinda dead too, some of them caught a few rounds through the door..."
"We're in some real pretty shit now", the more negative side of Cray's personality seems to hold the consensus of the living inhabitants. The entire interior of the cockpit is decorated in crimson bits of the now very deceased pilot and co pilot, both riddled with at least several bullet holes in various parts of their anatomy. Marr finishes kicking to death some enemy medic further down the hallway, the ebon's squeals and pleas for mercy eventually subside under the repeated stamping of the armour's boot caving in his ribcage. Leaving only the sound of the remaining turbine struggling to maintain altitude on autopilot, "we're in the shit aren’t we sir?"
"Yup." Cray grumbles, "get the rest of the section together up here and I'll have a look at getting this ol' bird down in one piece." While the rest of them start the final part of their sweep and clear he sits down in the pilots now empty chair and looks out over the ocean of winking lights, LED's, red gore and an obscured HUD all over the windshield. For not the second time in his life Cray realises that he has absolutely no idea of what to do, except that scraping the muck off the windshield with the pilot's hat is probably a good place to start. There was the first time in his life where he had no idea of what to do and memories of a 15 year olds summer came floating back for some strange reason and maybe it was his life flashing before his eyes like they said it sometimes did when you where about to die. At least on the first occasion there was the collection of his dads 'training magazines' in a chest out in the back shed which got him at least educated enough to get a girls bra off. Now he was really just winging it and trying to compare it with a powerarmour jump pack system, he wasn’t even very good at using that which wasn’t a real boost to his confidence.
The part on the HUD he recognised as being an altimeter was clicking down at a rapid pace and said 3000 at last glance, the airspeed said 995, now, did SLA use metric or the old yards, foot, inches system? In either case he was either doing 995 km/h, metres a second or mp/h and he was 2300 something’s above sea level, so he just grabbed the joystick and gave it a gentle yank backwards.
Whatever that particular lever did it only seemed to make the dropship 'angry' and start bucking like crazy, to placate the beast he puts his feet on the pedals in front of him and gave one a push to see what that did.
"We're gunna fucking DIE!"
"Yup", thought Cray's mind all too calmly as it agreed with the screams of someone out the back making the observation that they where now spinning violently in a clockwise direction. Then just when he thought things where going happily SNAFU, the dark shapes of buildings loomed out of the dirty grey clouds and rose up to meet the ship all too quickly for Cray's mind to take into account the terror of the situation and react with something suitable like a scream.
By the grace of someone divine entity they didn’t hit the first building very much, it just tore some of the Stingray's fins off that didn’t seem to make it any less aerodynamic so he pumped the other pedal for effect.
"We hit something and we're gunna fuckin DIE!"
The remaining turbine that wasn’t on fire howled in protest and the ship stopped spinning and managed to right itself sickly into something vaguely off horizontal, the yaw on the HUD was obscured by brain so he couldn’t really tell exactly how many degrees but figured it was "good enough". The screaming of his soldiers stopped for a few milliseconds on this new angle and trajectory and was now replaced with vomiting from inner eardrums in distress. Walkways didn’t seem to bother the Stingray on its descent, even though 11 of the flimsy metal constructions where snapped in two and began the 1249 somethings fall into the darkness below. Now that he had the ship straight it was only a matter of bringing it down in this canyon of buildings flashing past and if he was going to hit something, "aim for something soft", Cray thought aloud.
There wasn’t even the obligatory "we're gunna DIE!"
He almost felt cheated when a large, flat-topped green building loomed out of the mist underneath them, it would have been a good place to land. Obviously because it was covered in other flying vehicles like this one, only much smaller and he was going too fast to stop on it. But the Stingray scraped its way off the top clearing a nice neat path through all 15 of the pretty green aircraft that where lined up in a row and piled them ahead of his ship and off the edge, except one. That particular one on his right bounced around on the entrance to his remaining turbine, he could even see the pilot in it still, the man didn’t look at all happy about this new acquaintance either, just before he disappeared into the cavernous 18 metre cowling.
That was it, they where truly screwed now and there was no doubt in Cray's remaining cognitive braincells that hadn’t succumbed to the fear of death. There had been the remote chance of living and now it was gone with an almighty explosion and tearing of metal from a Kilcopter being ground into shavings from a huge turbine, which promptly expired.
Street level came up to greet Cray's tear filled eyes 5 seconds later as the Stingray began plowing a path down a 4 lane street filled full of these funny looking 3 wheeled cars, motorbikes, the occasional APC and hundreds of pedestrians. All of which where either ground under the 300 ton vehicle or simply tossed over the top like a child's discarded toy as it left a wake of alloy confetti, sparks and unrecognisable red smears of biological matter.