Incursion Vector

026

 [▲] Unidentified vessel, Caminha Waypoint

The stabs of the painkiller injectors were worse than the actual pain was.

Nim looked down at her shrapnel-riddled arm, noted most of the skin had been completely charred off in the explosion, then ignored it and began to scramble around with her good hand for purchase on something she could use to pull herself up. Her suit had gone almost completely rigid due to a surplus of energy being pumped through the liquid kinetic armoring to insulate against the explosion, though as the seconds ticked by the pressure lessened. She knew something was wrong internally and she guessed every organ between her neck and crotch was at least bruised with a few of them likely to be leaking. Still, there was only so long the suit boosters would last before shock from blood loss set in hard and she had to make sure Damien and Karda were all right in case she passed out.

Pushing herself up to her feet she used what remained of her left fingers to initiate a hard reboot of her suit systems. Exosuits were technically not supposed to be forced into hard restarts since it shut off every feature the gear had and re-launched the programs one by one. But while swimming in morphine with a side of epinephrine she doubted she'd feel the pain from her arm while the reboot was going on and she knew for a fact she could hold her breath for five times longer than it took for startups to run. What no factory trainer would tell a cadet was that a hard reboot was infinitely faster than waiting for onboard VTI to sort itself out after a Dropkick. After all, it killed the location pings and nobody wanted to loose track of the kids wearing the really expensive equipment. Naturally their combat instructor Zee had taught the process to all the Heinlein's marine cadets the second week they'd been allowed to touch real suits—and subsequently used the downtime during the restart to beat the crap out of them as an example of why they shouldn't depend on technology to save their lives in a fight.

Tech is a tool, he'd remind them every other week. Humans made it this far because we create the BEST fucking tools in the animal kingdom. However, DO NOT crutch on your tech! People've been killing shit for thousands of years with bare hands and dumb fucking luck. If you think your fancy suit of superior tech will save you from having a knife stuffed in a sweet spot by some bastard really out to kill you, that fucker will KILL YOU because you AREN'T LOOKING OUT FOR HIM. Don't DEPEND on your suit—as you can see, it can be shut off WITH YOU STILL IN IT. You need to DEPEND on the tools evolution gave you: a big fucking brain and two opposable thumbs.

The first lump she located the minute she could move her limbs again was Karda. She remembered throwing him to the ground just before the explosion but very little else. Rolling him onto his back she slammed her good hand onto his faceplate four times, at which point he slapped the side of her arm twice to confirm he'd started his suit's reboot, then jerked a clenched fist over his head towards a pile of smoldering hydroponic grates. She signed to him to focus on getting his coms up before shoveling her way through the wreckage to find Damien, Spade, Shred and Shadow lined up shoulder-to-shoulder with their asses facing the blast area.

“...tide I've … near-field radio only,” came Karda's rasping voice through her helmet speaker. He was wheezing as though someone had dropped a kiloton weight on his sternum but sounded fine otherwise. “Mantis? Tantalus guys?”

Nim yanked up on Damien's corpsman bar and noticed a steel shaft of hydroponics metal protruding from his right side. It hadn't gone through anything vital but he was likely too sedated to be useful for the moment. She drug him back to Karda and proceeded to check on the three pilots from Tantalus. Amazingly enough, despite their backs being a cornfield of shrapnel and unexploded black goo from the hydroponic vats, none of them were severely injured.

“We need to clear the fuck out,” she announced as her suit finished rebooting life support systems and cycling oxygen through her helmet again so she could take a deep breath. “Spade, have any charges left? I forgot my cutting torch in my other exosuit.”