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Old December 26th, 2005, 12:54 PM
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AgentZero AgentZero is offline
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Default Re: OT: Hell is For Heroes.

Welcome....



Without another word, Kagan and Saraea turned and headed back towards the Daedalus. Alice, for her part disappeared into the crowd, reappearing to cast an apprehensive glance back at the two every time Kagan started to wonder about where she'd gotten off to. They reached the ship considerably faster than they'd left it, thanks to the wide berth the crowds continued to give Saraea, the two of them ducking slightly as they passed through the airlock door. Kagan glanced backwards, waiting for Alice to board before he sealed the doors. When she failed to materialize, he cast an anxious look up the corridor and slammed his head into the airlock door from the start of finding Alice looking back at him.

"Fracking son of a fracking frack!" he snarled. "Don't do that!"
Alice watched him impassively for a moment longer before turning the same gaze towards Saraea. "What happened to your hand?" she asked with innocent curiosity.
Saraea glanced down at her seemingly entirely flesh and blood right hand and flexed it gently. "I lost it during the Corporate Wars," she said. "How did you know?"
"When we were walking back to the ship you brushed it against a pipe that was one hundred and forty seven degrees Celsius and didn't even flinch," Alice replied. "That and the noise."
"The noise?" asked Kagan irritably, still rubbing his head. "Prosthetics make the same amount of noise as normal flesh and blood. In other words, frack all."
"No," Alice replied slowly, as if speaking to a particularly slow child. "They make noise. And her right hand makes a different noise to her left. Mechanical. Squeaky. Almost distracting." She stood still for a moment, staring off at a point in between Saraea and Kagan's bewildered faces, as if lost in deep thought. Then, she shrugged suddenly, dismissing whatever thoughts she'd been having. "No matter," she decided. "I'm filthy. Grubby men and all that. Going to shower." With that, she stripped off her admittedly reeking clothes and tossed them to Kagan. "Probably want to burn those," she advised before strolling down the corridor and disappearing around a corner.
"How does-" Saraea finally managed.
"Don't know," Kagan admitted. "I'm still trying to get passed the beeps thing."

Yolanda Powell felt something crunch beneath the sole of her armored environment suit. She froze, willing herself to look down, but far to aware of the hefty dose of sedatives it had required for her to stay in control of herself the last time something had gone crunch, and she'd glanced down to find she'd trodden on a child's skull. Eventually, she managed to force her eyes downwards and breathed a sigh of relief as they fell upon a large piece of ceramocrete poking up through the ashes. She pushed on, and soon reached the crest of the hill they'd been climbing for the last hour. She stared into the valley below, and knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was only the deadening effect of the sedatives coursing through her veins that allowed her to retain any semblance of composure as she beheld the remnants of her home. What had once been a thriving metropolitan colony, home to fifteen million souls was now nothing more than a blackened scar on the valley floor below. Everything had been reduced to soot and ash, just like everything else on the entire surface of the planet. She heard a choking sob over the comlink and turned her head to the right in time to see Lieutenant Liu crumple to her knees and press her head to the ground. Her entire family had been here, Powell knew. Grandparents, parents, husband and children, all now nothing more than ash drifting through the valley. She left Liu to the attention of Ensign Jones, knowing that in her emotionally dead state, she was more likely to make things worse for the lieutenant than she was to help. Instead, she turned her head to the left, to her Exec, Edwin O'Shea and knew she should feel guilt as she looked upon the expression of horror on his face. The sedatives she'd taken were a luxury afforded to captains only, and aside from O'Shea, no one on the ship even knew they existed.
"Why?" he whispered. "Who? How?"
"It's only the last two that concern me, Ed," Powell said grimly. "Why can wait until we've tracked down the bastards who did this and decorated their ships with the intestines of her crew."
Edwin's admonishment was cut short by a cry from Liu. "Captain!"
Powell turned to see the Lieutenant on her feet and pointing at something down in the valley. She turned the zoom on her suit's visor up to maximum and frowned at the strange object in the dust below.
"O'Shea?" she inquired.
"I know, ma'am," he said resignedly. "What the hell is that?

Kaelan O’Shea flicked a switch and the Defiant transited from the chaos of null-space into the very depths of Hell itself. Missiles and weapon fire swarmed about him and he cursed quite creatively as he forced his nimble ship to duck and weave its way to a relatively safe portion of space. It was only then that he turned his ship's powerful sensors on the maelstrom behind him.
"Well now," he said in surprise. "That just ain't right."
A massive Tauren fleet swarmed around the colossal ship Kaelan had been tracking for the last six days. Unrelenting fire poured down onto it's massive hull, and answering fire poured back just as savagely, but the unfathomably big ship continued relentlessly towards the planet ahead of it. Kaelan turned his sensors towards the planet itself, and got another less than pleasant surprise. It was inhabited, heavily so, and they energy signatures his sensors were picking up were unmistakably Tauren.
"What are you lot doing with a colony this far out?" he wondered. "And how'd you get it so big without us noticing you, hmmm?"
As he watched, an entire squadron of Tauren light cruisers bore down on the colossus, firing madly, but rather than pull out to execute another run, they continued forward and suicided themselves upon it's hull. Kaelan scowled. The Taurens were just as unlikely to perform such an act as humans, and if they were willing to take such drastic measures, they must be trying to prevent something very, very bad. He hadn't long to wait to discover what the Taurens were so desperate to avoid, as the alien vessel reached whatever range it needed to reach, and two incredibly bright, incredibly large beams of light flashed outwards and slammed into the planet. The burst lasted a mere few seconds, but the effect was devastating. A massive wave of fire plumed outwards from the epicentre of the blast and raced across the planet with incredible speed. As Kaelan stared in absolute horror, the colossus began to accelerate, it's task complete, it headed rapidly for the outer reaches of the solar system to make null-space transit. Numb with shock, Kaelan was only motivated to action by the fact that the beast was heading towards the same part of the outer reaches of the solar system that he himself was currently occupying. Acting on pure instinct, he brought his small ship around and flashed into null-space, bringing the Defiant up through the hyperspace bands a little bit faster than was really safe as he set a course back for Terran space, with only one thought running through his mind.
'What the hell was that?'
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