"Spot of luck this is," Kegan Marr grinned from ear to ear as he emptied the SHIVER sergeant out of his body blocker armour and into the nearest drain opening. "Yeah, not bad at all," Gary dragged over the last two SHIVER's from their APC and helped the sapper dislodge the former inhabitants. "Nice warm cosy SHIVER sleeper APC, one careless former owner, plenty of food."
Luck had little to do with it Cray knew, Jrt'kn and Waylan had done a brilliant number on getting the idiots inside the APC to open up by flashing the operative ID Mack had found attached to a now deceased Frother stoned on drugs. After that it was 10 seconds of bloody knife work on a squad of SHIVER's stuck in between a rock and a hard place. One had run to avoid the blades and been chopped into meat by the Scythe machinegun, another tried to man the reaper cannon and collected a DU round in the forehead for his trouble.
Jrt'kn collected most of the punishment from the browbeaters but he was going to be ok, Cray ordered him to lie down and sleep it off while the kickstart did its business. Reluctantly the shaktar did as he was told, he'd done enough for today and no one begrudged him extra rest.
Five minutes later they where rolling into the depths of lower downtown, Cray had a better working knowledge of vehicles like this than he did of things that flew. Of which the rest of them seemed eternally grateful that they where not going to die as a result. Mack went through the vehicle with a bug scanner checking for tracers and Marr did the best he could a nuetralising any they found, both where astounded to find 8 separate units both in the APC and on suits of Body Blocker. They even uncovered a BLA Blitzer revolver which Jrt'kn ended up with, seeming pleased with the new firearm, Marr just snorted and called it a "piece of pretty chrome" and compared it with his own revolver. A gruesome black ceramic block of snub nosed 14mm hand cannon called a DRAUG 090 that could cut a full grown man in half with 2 shots and blow the heads clean off Chagrin Stormers with just one. Cray had a fair idea of the 'hot custom' loads of DU sabot that Marr had been known cook up for it in his spare time and it worried him that the whole thing would one day just brew up and take off an arm.
It was a backup weapon and the thought of carrying around the BLA revolver as a main piece of firepower like the SLA OP’s did, just didn’t make sense to the Thresher armourer. So he did his best with the revolver to make it fit Jrt'kn's large claws, filed off the rear sight and cut 6 inches off the barrel, "fucking dumb ass SLA. Their powder burn's too quick to make any use of that 12 inch barrel, ends up slowing it down even before gets shat out the end." Jrt'kn took back the now 'ugly' revolver, stripped of its rosewood handgrips, barrel shortened and scratched from the mauling of Marr's vibrofile, but it felt good in his hands even though the grips where a lump of nerophane packing rubber and duct tape.
After following the navamap system for 2 hours Cray pulled them over to an area relatively free of anything of worth to SLA and into a quiet secondary street, what meager light there was filtering down this far was quickly going. "Button up, get some rest peoples its been a long day. Take 90 minute shifts each keeping watch. Marr, you take first watch, Jrt'kn you can take the night off."
It was strangely relaxing in the confines of the APC within its thick hull and it was good to be out of his armour for a change, he probably smelled, as did they all but Cray was too tired to notice. Rain pelted down off the surrounding buildings rhythmically while the radio buzzed with the chatter of SHIVER's, Fire crews and Operatives attending all the troubles of the big city. The hours must have flicked by like minutes and he didn’t even remember being asleep when Waylan woke him for his shift and crawled back into his sleeping bag. It would be a crime to pass out again so Cray made a determined effort to be awake, alert and functional. So far nothing had happened all night except for some gunfire up a few blocks away which no one wanted to investigate anyway, he hauled out the ration packs and realised just how damn hungry he was. It must have been 3 days at least since he'd last eaten and took to the mixture of fish, rice and crackers like a hungry dog, there where some good points to being in this company he remembered, the food was great. Coffee followed 15 minutes later and he was back to some semblance of feeling vaguely human, spiking it with whiskey would be good but drinking on guard duty was something people got shot for, as was expected.
He checked out the Aleph and plugged it into the APC's existing radio antenna ports and flicked it on just to check.
//Start RX Flashtraffic
SITREP RX- SALTWATER
WILL PROVIDE DROP OFF POINT 15:40 TOMMOROW
WELCOME TO HELL LITTLE FISHES
CHICANE TH03456-UXX
//end RX
"Hmm," Cray scratched the stubble on his chin thoughtfully, he hoped to high heaven that whoever this Chicane was had a better idea of what they where here for than he did. "He better not fit us up either," said to no one in particular quietly. The UXX tag on the company licence number meant Chicane was a spook, a spy, usually deep cover and had been here for quite some time, though there was no indication of how long really. Spies didn’t have long lifespans once they went active, Chicane had about the same odds that his section did here on Mort. Probably worse actually he did the numbers in his head, he had about 2% chance of lasting 6 months, the spy had about a 5% chance every 2 months. Somehow this probably wouldn’t be a real long-term relationship Cray figured.
A loud wet slapping sound nearby shook him out of his reverie and he immediately reached across for the FLAY pistol sitting on the dashboard and flicked on the IR spotlight mounted at the front of the APC. There was a body lying in the middle of the road he could see through the rain and the dashboard monitors, naked and it had fallen quite some distance, leaving a 10 centimetre impression in the black asphalt. He corrected himself, zooming in a little closer, more likely thrown from somewhere up above and it might have been female but she was too badly damaged from the fall to tell.
Cray flicked off the searchlight, there was no point in looking at the poor things broken body all night lying in the rapidly filling pool of water and gore and even less reason for him to wake someone else up to go have a look. Besides, he didn’t like dead bodies at the best of times, a funny quirk for a seasoned soldier maybe, but it was something that the majority of normal people didn’t like having anything to do with if they could help it
Or so he thought.