Angel rolls onto his back as he slides. The slivers grind into his flesh and he grits his teeth in pain. He opens fire through the portal, somehow managing to miss Semo's bulk and yet still gets a satisfying spang of a dead-on shot. The big gunner shoves Andy and Luis aside and pushes Amo to the ground but he makes it through the Gate, spins, and steps back through it, coming face-to-helmet with a staggered, bleeding Turai. Semo's reeling from the climate shift and the snap of Angel's gunfire; the alien warrior's reeling from a sledgehammer-like ricochet off his helmet, not to mention Semo can see ragged meat and bone through the xenohuman's left arm.

The Turai raises its sidearm once again. Semo makes a "hmpf" noise and drops the hammer. A smoking, bleeding alien tumbles into the remnants of the Pit supercomputers.

Now the Pit is clear - but the cigar-ships are above the clearing and opening fire! Hugh's return fire bounces off their hulls, but at least he's hitting his target. The rapid pulsing whap beams crater the ground around the crash site, filling the air with dust and dirt. Somehow amidst the chaos noone else gets hit. Hugh shoves Taylor through and finally steps through himself, slamming the shutdown nodule and killing the portal.

The metallic scent of blood is strong. Kitty's breath gurgles and blood bubbles at her mouth. Mellish is lying next to Angel, screaming for a medic, how he can't move his legs. By the freight doors, the brown-robed tall man is curled up in a pool of crimson.

You're all dizzy, sick to your stomachs, shivering in the air conditioned room-temperature environment. There are chunks of flesh, shards of chrome armor, tatters of olive drab fatigues, severed limbs, and pieces of scientific equipment everywhere. It looks like the Turai were collecting the dead down here, judging from the excessive gore that paints the concrete walls.

The Pit is dark, lit only by the electrical fires in the server floor and the Delta team's tac-lights. Max can see just fine.

Max's HUD shows 8 more Turai in the facility before someone gets wise to him. There's a foreign order over Max's voxlink and one by one the IFF glyphs wink out.

*slams big red [color=red:2f1a185ada]GATE ABORT[/color] button*

"Captain, the Turai HUD picks up 8 unfriendlies still inside the facility...No, Wait!...It...it just went...Shit! They went dark!..Must have turned off their beacons. At least we now know how many we're dealing with."

Pushing his way throught the croud around the Gate, Semo steps inside. The warp effect hits him as before, but is blunted by the Dramamine they all took, thankfully. Besides, people are dying; there's no time for weakness now, and Semo isn't about to let them down.

Turning and stepping through the one-way portal effect, Semo finds the Turai trying to shake off Angel's shot. No dice. 7.62 NATO carves him into a bloody hunk of meat, regardless of the man's armor.

Looking up, Sgt Putupu sees the Hugh step through behind the others and cancel the gate amid a hail of fire from the incoming ships. The smell of blood and the nguished moans of the injured are palpable. A quick scan of the room shows body parts, both human and alien littering the room. Semo find himself actually glad for the lack of light in here.

"Captain! I recommend we set up a defensive perimeter immediately. Who's still fit for duty?"

Luis pulls himself to his feet, and responds to Semo's question, even though it wasn't technically intended for him. "Most of us. Give me a sec with the frisbee." He already has the device out, and is starting work in on Mellish.

Hugh drops the magazine clear of his rifle and reloads.

"Everybody move behind the gate!"

It's not much, but atleast it's some cover from another dial-in and attacks from the blast door.

"Doc, we need to disable the gate. Sarge, reload and aim for the blast door."

As for Hugh, he walks over to the prisoners and stands guard over them.

Amo and his comrade are clearly veterans of Gate travel. They don't show any signs of transfer disorientation.

"Varos," the female says. Amo nods, motioning with his head towards the bleeding alien gentleman. "Hethna Varos. Big man. No shoot head."

While Hugh is having an enlightening conversation with the prisoners, Luis works his miracles on Mellish and Cavanaugh. Mellish's leg wounds are myriad and gory - if Luis didn't have the frisbee the Hebrew Hammer'd be dying of blood loss in a few minutes. As it is, however, a pass with the alien device and Mellish is soon back on shaky, mottled legs.

"Too bad that thing doesn't regenerate pants," Mellish quips, sighing at the tattered state of his fatigues.

Kitty's more touch-and-go. Luis doesn't even know where to start. Nearly every major organ is perforated. Quite a few of the slivers penetrated her torso side-to-side and the hypersonic rounds carried too much blood out with them. The donut device works its magic. Raw meat seals over with fresh skin, blood stops pumping out of Kitty's left side, and her breathing normalizes. She tries to get up but decides to lie still instead after the wracking pain subsides.

Angel and Semo's wounds are treatable with normal first aid or the frisbee at their discretion.

Taylor's wiggling skinless new fingers, still a little high on painkillers. His left arm's three shades lighter than the rest of his body, gradiating from dark brown and mottled tan freckle-marks to that ubiquitous light brown where the arm was completely replaced.

"You know what? I wonder if my fingerprints are gonna be different. I wonder if I'm gonna HAVE fingerprints," Taylor says. "It's like... it's like somebody just picked some guy at random and copied his ass into that widget."

admiralducksauce wrote:

Taylor's wiggling skinless new fingers, still a little high on painkillers. His left arm's three shades lighter than the rest of his body, gradiating from dark brown and mottled tan freckle-marks to that ubiquitous light brown where the arm was completely replaced.

"You know what? I wonder if my fingerprints are gonna be different. I wonder if I'm gonna HAVE fingerprints," Taylor says. "It's like... it's like somebody just picked some guy at random and copied his ass into that widget."

As Luis is musing over Taylor's comments, Dietrich coughs, then moans. It's not much, but it's more than he should have been able to muster, given his past state. Luis hurries over, and inspects him. He's still a man barely alive, but it's by a slightly larger margin. It's not one worth writting home about, but it is a margin. After another try with the frisbee fails, Luis cracks open his medical case, and sees what the good old fasioned combination of a cocktail of drugs will do.

"Captain. I say we secure our immediate position, locate me a cutting torch, and I'll make sure none of those bastards inside Mesa Negras get any reinforcements for the next thousand years." says Max, looking around for tools.

"Agreed. Let's topple the ring."

Luis goes to work while Andy and Max take beam rifles and Turai swords to the scaffolding holding up the Gateway.

"Stanhill..." Dietrich finally mumbles, weakly grasping Luis' sleeve with freckled fingers. "Where... tuv it lorem? Are we back? Dolor et looking at me like that?"

CRASH! The Gateway slams down onto the concrete floor, raising dust. Thus begins the grisly task of blocking the Gateway with anything and everything. The server cabinets, each one riddled with shrapnel, get moved first, but there's not enough, so the dead get used to fill in the cracks. Semo's carrying a corpse missing some of its lower half from 40mm rounds when he notices three things. One, there's not a lot of radiation damage. Two, this man was shot in the chest with a firearm. Three, the body has general's stars. It's General Sanderson. A cursory examination of the rest of the dead finds at least half of the Gateway Project's command staff were blocked from the worst of the radiation but were summarily executed, some with Turai weaponry, some with Earth weapons. Their bodies, of course, are tattered from the Mark 19's autofire like the rest of the dead, alien or otherwise.

With the Gateway blocked, the question is, do you test it? It's been over ten minutes, and the alien artifact still has the Turai silver lozenge attached to it.

Hugh surveys the dead Earth personnel with a sneer on his face. He shoots the prisoners an angry look.

Give me a reason to hurt you...

"Angel, Sumo, you're with me - we clean out the remaining turai. The rest stays here. Doc, I want all that alien crap disconnected from the gate. And...you're in command."

He shoots an apologetic glance to Taylor, then prepares to move out.

Gatac wrote:

Hugh surveys the dead Earth personnel with a sneer on his face. He shoots the prisoners an angry look.

Give me a reason to hurt you...

"Angel, Sumo, you're with me - we clean out the remaining turai. The rest stays here. Doc, I want all that alien crap disconnected from the gate. And...you're in command."

He shoots an apologetic glance to Taylor, then prepares to move out.

Max is still uneasy about the Gate being charged and (allegedly) ready to be activated.

*takes Hugh aside*

"Captain. I agree with everything you just said, but don't you think we should try and activate the Gate. I'd hate to have all this work we've just done be foiled by the damned-reliability of the Gate technology."

Hugh sighs.

"Doc, we gotta get over this 'I give an order, you object' thing. We're killing the gate. No tests, no 'this looks interesting', no nothing. Kill it. We'll test it later - when I have three dozen fucking Army Rangers aiming their guns at it. Got that?"

"Alright."

*turns to Nerd Herd*

"Ok. Andy, Kitty...you heard the Captain. Disconnect the Turai power supply from the Gate. When you're done that, I want to get a complete rundown of what is salvagable in the Control Room. Move it, people. Chop, chop."

Hearing the captain's order, Semo switches out the partial belt in his 48 for a new one. No point risking running out of ammo in the middle of a firefight.

Minutes later, the Gate comes crashing down and Semo pitches in with the grisly task of clogging it with ruined equipment and dead bodies.

*What the hell?!* Examination shows that one of the bodies he's carrying is General Sanderson. Plus, he was shot with an Earth gun, not one of the strange alien weapons. Thinking this may be significant, Semo reports it immediately to the captain and Dr. Kilgore. "... So either the aliens have learned to use our weapons, or there was some kind of mutiny here."

Time to clean out the nest. "Yes sir!" Semo replies, and racks the slide on his Mk 48. "Time to finish this."

Luis is distracted from Dietrich for a second by the tremendous crash of the Gate falling to the horizantal, but the odd words stick out like a sore thumb. Oddly, they almost sound like the Other's language. He frowns, crouches down, and speaks slowly, "Junior, we're back at Mesa Negras. You took some bad radiation. You understand me?"

"Yeah, I understand you, Doc," Junior replies, getting a little more lucid as the drugs kick in. "Radiation... all I remember is light, man. I... I was in Colombia, or the Phillipines... somewhere. I can't. Why can't I remember...?" Tears trickle out of Junior's new brown eyes as he repeats, "I can't remember my mother..."

Andy easily removes the power cabling from the lozenge. The alien power supply remains floating about waist-height.

Cavanaugh shakily makes her way to the Control Room overlooking the Pit, stopping every few steps to catch her breath in newly-healed lungs. All the command systems appear to be intact, though lacking power. Breakers are unresponsive. The source of the problem appears to be the nuclear power plant in Redfield. The direct underground line to Mesas Negras has been cut, leaving the research facility unpowered.

That means those blast doors to the freight elevator aren't going to open wider than the man-sized crack they're at now, not without a team of hardy people working their asses off on the manual override. It means the freight elevator to the walled-off high-security motor pool on the surface isn't operative. It means the elevators are out, and any high-security doors are going to need brow-sweat and muscles to open rather than keycards and passcodes. It means that the Turai have the run of the facility. It means you can't call for help, not from below.

On a more immediately useful note, there ARE two separate armories in the facility. Level 2 houses the primary armory for the surface and low-security levels, while level 6 has a smaller armory for the high-clearance levels. Max isn't privy to all the research being done in MN, but the lower levels house all sorts of whacky bleeding-edge prototype military contracts. The medical wing is on level 1, and would have plenty of supplies to restock Stanhill's quickly-depleting equipment.

The grid's down, score one for the visiting team.

But we've got -their- power supply now.

A brief flash of super-brilliance nearly overcomes our intrepid Action Scientist.

"Kitty! If the command systems are still intact, we should be able to power at least a few main functions with the Turai Lozenge. Andy, let's get this thing over to one of the power grid terminals. Kitty, see if you can contact anyone else in Mesa Negras."

The lozenge easily floats over to one of the main terminals. Andy carefully strips the heavy protective sheath and feeds it into the lozenge. The alien devices quicksilvers over the cable. There are a handful of flashes, like lightning in a bottle, then the clunk-hummmmmmm of systems powering up filters through the entire complex.

On closer inspection, not every system has returned. The radiation seems to have fried a number of more delicate systems, but it's too soon to tell which ones are down.

Kitty keys her radio over an open channel. *This is the away team. If anyone is picking this up, please respond. I repeat, this is the away team calling any survivors.*

Kitty goes to repeat her message once more, but she's interrupted by a response. *He-hello? I'm in the Exotic Materials Lab, sublevel five... I sealed myself in, but I'm.. I'm hurt. The things... they shot me in the leg... Are you a resc-*

There's a violent radio squelch, then in a heavily-accented approximation of English across all channels:

*Want some candy?*

Angel gets up, gripping his side and hastily applying a compress pack to the worst of the wounds he's suffered before reloading his rifle.

"Yessir."

He keeps his rifle up and watchful over the team, frowning when whoever was in the Exotic Materials lab meets a bloody end. He smiles grimly at the message.

"I wonder if the alien bastards found the Snickers machine yet."