“Welcome Outsiders, are you here to redeem us from the creatures of the night?”
Yuma narrowed her eyes at the little girl as the Clan’s suspicions softly started to melt in the face of the youth's innocent appearance. Yuma was picking up something very wrong with the… girl, though she couldn’t quite place it. The way she talked was unsettling, yes, but there was something else. The movements were too fluid, too sharp.
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The crabs that were pursuing her had stopped. Then they turned away and skittered past her hiding spot again.
She dropped down, Leanne was tired and hurting. Her plasma pistol was essentially permanently attached to her hand at this point, the flesh wrapped and cauterized by the heat of overuse against the pistol grip. The smell of burning flesh had given her another disadvantage, crabs could smell and they liked the smell of cooking flesh, especially Human. She had elected to stop shooting and finally the scent had faded.
That’s why she was surprised as she peeked out from her hiding spot. It was empty. Her intuition flared to warn her that it was not over but merely a reprieve. This was dumb.
A list of reasons, thoughts, and excuses as to why she even bothered with the scouting mission in the first place came to mind. She wanted to find Tule. Jack’s raw and unrestrained emotions unsettled her. She felt like she had something to prove to the group. Her own feelings about her Clan. If she escaped and found them dead then how could she have been so selfish to leave them without her. She had stayed on top of the mother crab, to what? Save one more Clan Member? By that, she had failed her duty to the rest of the Clan.
More than that she feared that they were alive and she’d not be missed at all. Jack seemed fine in the twists and turns of chaos as he was pulled and pushed across the ship, Jonah was content as long as he had new things to learn, Tule… well he was part of her adhoc squad and she wasn’t ready to just let him go to his doom.
The real reason was somewhere among all of those and also much more ridiculous than any of them. She had overused her pain limiter and had been doing so for far longer than any other point in her life. A continuous dump of dopamine and feel-good biochemicals in her bloodstream with no actual feelings of pain to hold them back, since the beginning of the Run. Her disciplined and orderly way of thinking had become emotional and cloudy. Was still emotional and cloudy. However, it's easy to fool oneself that the awareness of a problem means that it has somehow, miraculously, transformed into something else.
Sighing, she turned her attention back, holstered her water-pistol, and took out a Magno-Tube. It was difficult to do with one hand but she wasn’t ready to peel her hand off the plasma pistol. She couldn’t risk pushing her pain limiter further than it already was. If she passed out, she was done.
Leanne looked at the Magno-Tube for a few delayed moments. It had seemed appropriate when Tule had done something similar on top of the floating crab. She twisted it open and set it aside. Then, slowly, she peeled off makeshift bandages from a few areas around her body exposing the deep wounds across her ribcage, her thigh, and her shoulder.
She picked back up the Magno-Tube then pushed it into each exposed part, gasping at the pain, the decay, the feeling of loss. It would only take Nano from dead tissue so beyond the dead tissue she had to forcefully push in what Nano it could not freely take.
It sealed itself closed and she put it aside, then she looked at her flesh. Portions of the damaged, dying, and dead tissue were now growing gray and black and necrotic. She grimaced as she swiped Medjel over her wounds. It didn’t seal. She cursed silently through gritted teeth then plunged her hand deep into the wounds, finally she felt it catch against the Nano-infused flesh inside her and harden.
Gasping for breath, she tapped a few commands into her portable then took a cord and plugged it into the goggles. While that was working, she released her pain limiter and unbidden tears flowed down the side of her face. She screwed her eyes tight and rebuilt the limiter where possible and reinforced it where rebuilding it was impossible.
She was running low on Nano since she had just pushed out the last traces of her Free-Nano stores into the Magno-Tube. Overall it wasn’t her best work. She silently scoffed at that, she hadn’t been doing her best work for a while; how many of her Clan had died because she didn’t respond fast enough? Wasn’t prepared enough? She should have prepared for a Run even if the chances of it happening were a long shot. She felt waves of regret and was almost grateful for them as they pushed away and muted the pain.
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The limiter flicked back on unstably, then in a breathless moment, held. She let out a breath she hadn't realized that she was holding as the pain receded and it brought a smile to her face. She felt giddy, her filthy, dank surroundings felt… better.
She logically knew that was the mountain of dopamine that was still coursing through her brain with no associated pain to counteract it. The goggles finished their data transfer and were taken off and placed on top of her portable alongside the Magno-Tube she had just filled.
In a trance she watched her Nano swim in the middle of the device, stained red by the blood and the iron that had been forced inside alongside the Nano. She turned and placed them underneath random scraps of detritus, then looked up and saw a recessed ledge with a rusted hole through the steel above it near where she had suspended herself earlier. Better.
She brought herself to her feet and stumbled for a second before another flush of feel-good was dumped into her system. She turned the corner and waited. She took a deep breath. She was ready.
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Even Jack was getting a bit tired by the sheer distance they had covered, the winding corridors and small passageways adding strain and distance well beyond what was covered in the first Run. At least there’s no degeneration cannon.
He had long scooped Jonah up onto his back, the older man couldn’t keep pace and Jack was unwilling to separate. Why had Lea done that? It made no sense no matter how he tried to process it.
The extra weight of Jonah was offset by the small silver-gold rat that had been riding on the older man’s shoulder. Its squeaks and taps of right or left on Jack’s shoulder helped him keep his pace up and no waste energy having to stop and realign.
Besides that, it was chaos. Sometimes it wasn’t though. They would run and turn and dart for long stretches in musky silence then run headfirst into a roaming swarm of crabs. Although, they could hardly be considered ‘swarms’ with the wave of Rat-kind bearing down on them.
There were definitely mutant crabs here, although they didn’t seem to be in large numbers. During one of the silent portions of the journey he had found out from the Trash-SI that the oversized, multi-brained, boxy crabs that he and Rattigan had dueled were called ‘Tacticians’, could coordinate large groups of crabs like an extension of their own bodies.
That made sense with what Jonah had mentioned about some sort of Psy-usage from them, they must have had some psychic control over crabs. Or maybe it was just communication.
He glanced at Rattigan who was running nearby. The huge ManRat would look from side to side and even though Jack couldn’t see or sense any of the Psy communication he could sense the shifts of biological electrical signals, aka other Rats, move and shift through the corridors and passageways around them. He hoped it was just communication.
Jack had asked Jonah to try and track the Psy signal while he was carrying him but Jonah couldn’t pick up anything across any Psy-band at all. That didn't quite make sense to him either.
He wasn’t sure whether he had evened the playing field or doomed himself. He continued to move his feet.
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“So you’re telling me. That there are Escape Pods back here?” Kala kept HeLbert, her hard-light cannon, if not completely trained on the little cyborg they had found, then not entirely aimed away from it either.
“Yez. Affirmative.”
Her eyes narrowed, “But we can’t use them.”
“Yez. The blezzed ship travels too fazt. Flezh flenzed from steel.”
Kala glanced at Eilien, her shadow and the little medic girl; then to the Guardian and the Monitor from the Clan; then to Uller, who was using a knife she gave him to breathlessly emerge from his Medjel cocoon.
“But you can launch them, yeah?”
“...” The little cyborg glanced at her cannon, “Yez.”
“And the Engine’s controlled from here, right?”
“Yez.”
She took a deep breath, this had been annoying from the beginning.
“So… slow down the engine.”
The cyborg looked again to her cannon that she minutely waved its firing line across its body.
“Impozzible.”
She looked to Uller and smiled just the tiniest amount, the little bird had finally come out of his shell. She furrowed her brow, he looked… different. He was always ugly but now he was near-hideous, not that she really cared much about that.
She sighed and leaned in close to the small creature, “Everytime you give me a one-word answer I’m going to take a finger.”
She snapped one backwards, one that was made of flesh. Kala wasn’t stupid, she didn’t want to start breaking machine parts on this little ‘borg. Who knew what they would need it to do.
It cried in shock and pain then slumped further.
“Did you have to do that?” Kala half-turned, it was the Monitor. She sighed and turned, “Listen we’re all on the same team here right?”
They didn’t look convinced. That was fine, she just needed a few moments.
“I know you don’t like me and that’s alright, but we have the same goal here and it’s clearly trying to be dense with us-”
She paused for a few moments…
“Need Bridge! Need connection to the Sacred Bridge! Without a Sacred Commandz it is impozzible!”
There it was, right on time. She turned back to it.
“Ah. So once we get the command from the Bridge, we’ll be able to slow down and launch Escape Pods… yeah? You can do all that?”
It nodded hurriedly. She started to turn back to the Clan team and saw Uller with a familiar glint in his eyes, he had ‘collapsed’ against a wall behind the two, seeming to catch his breath.
She smiled widely as she turned back to them, “See? He can help us.”
Her cannon started to spit hardlight.