Hull Damage
Page 63
Her bounty of pilfered equipment suddenly swollen twofold, Moira, after summoning down the elevator to the Twenty-Sixth deck, hunkers to the floor to collect her winnings before the noise of her scuffle attracts any undesirable company. She immediately deprives the humanoid of her ammunition belt, the Gantor of his SV7 and further laments her accursed jumpsuit in the face of still more unobtainable pocket change. As if on cue, the service elevator dings obligingly behind her. Moira Quicksilver, with soon-to-be-disassembled assault rifle slung over her shoulder, a belt to clip both batons to cinched around the waist of her neon yellow onesie and the remote starter twirled around her right pointer finger, gives each arm of the corridor a cautionary glance, as though she's about to cross a busy intersection, and darts into the service elevator's opening doors.
Once inside, she dials coordinates for the Seventeenth Deck and drops to her knees to dismantle the SV7 just as the elevator, after disengaging from the present clamps, shoots upward.
The HIN Surimiah, like all Mercy-class prisoner haulers, had a queer design. On spec, the craft was markedly similar in shape to any average spacefaring vessel and was only nominally larger than The Unconstant Lover herself; all in all, barely room enough to house one hundred prisoners, much less nine times that. In order to readily retrieve, transport and deposit such prodigious numbers of passengers, however, the Surimiah made use of a three-hundred foot cylinder, jutting straight out of the ship's underbelly, called a detainment column.
Ostensibly a thirty story building, a free-standing tower in its own right, the detainment column allowed The Endless Imperium the peerless ability to, seemingly on a whim, transfer entire wings of their planetary prisons to and fro across the civilized reaches of the galaxy. With relative ease, the Surimiah had charted a checkered course throughout the Midworlds, collecting the very crème de la crème of convicts, Moira Quicksilver included, from holding cells and provincial prisons along the way. Her coffers full, she cut canvas now for the fifth planet of the Prash system, freezing and lifeless Vorse, where she'd detach the column, the Seventeenth Deck would become the Seventeenth Floor and the Surimiah, thus unburdened, would depart for Medroteria or Jotor or wherever empty, idle prison ships go.
Moira, on the other hand, harbored other plans for the HIN Surimiah, plans one wouldn't find on any official Imperium manifest or procedural.
She's scarce enough time to wrest loose the SV7's percussion cap in the time she's allotted before the service elevator clicks into place on the Seventeenth Deck and Moira's forced to abandon her handiwork with a clatter on the cross-hatched grating as the doors grind open before her. Both her electrobatons unsheathe and extend before either standing sentry can even register the elevator's sudden presence behind them. With one culminating motion, she claps both their skulls together with fierce strikes to their corresponding temples. They collapse comically together, their bodies propped against one another in an unconscious canoodle before the yawning elevator doors.
After confirming a clear coast and recovering the assault rifle's component parts from behind her, Moira, weaving around the two toppled prison guards, notes the Surimiah continued prevalence of Gantorese personnel, wonders vaguely if Gant is her original port of call and busies herself with the elevator's nearby motor control box. Prying the main panel free certainly wasn't Moira's definition of easy, nor her definition of silent and, to judge from the shrill teltriton protest that echoes down the hall when she swats it aside with her electrobaton, she anticipates the arrival of re-enforcements within the next two minutes.
Luckily for Moira, the call request transponder within the control box is simply located, as no one had ever accused her of being an expert in elevator design. A little manual surgery later and she's successfully extracted the transponder and all its attendant cords and wiring. Coupled with the remote cell-door activator and the SV7's percussion cap, the service elevator's call request transponder represented the final piece of that strange cocktail of mismatched mechanical oddments so integral to Moira's escape.
How exactly any of these seemingly random pieces of technical apocrypha intended to spring her from this exhaustively secured prison hauler mid-warp, Moira had precisely no idea.
The Seventeenth Deck of the HIN Surimiah is more or less identical to its Twenty-Sixth Deck; a black teltriton corridor, cast in a gentle curve and outlined in the wavering pink light of the individual cells. Cell 17P is halfway around the column's circuit and Moira dares it openly, trio of disjointed machine parts in one gloved fist, electrified baton in the other. She fails to run afoul of any more guards along the way, though she does earn the semi-occasional hoot or catcall from an awake prisoner, a form of attention Moira's habitually deaf to. She lingers before the deflection door of Cell 17P, a shimmering membrane of projected pink energy entirely impermeable to anything but the insulated gloves worn by the Surimiah's guards and now Moira. The door's reflective light only manages to spike the wide-set eyes of the cell's sole occupant dim pink and, whomever may lurk in the cramped chamber's further corner, they don't so much as shift their weight or stir themselves at all in reaction to Moira's arrival.
She drops calmly into a knee before the scintillating barrier and, after waiting a beat, extends her gloved hand through the membrane. Despite the deflection glove's best efforts, her skin beneath still crawls and creeps unnaturally as she deposits each nonsensical item in a neat little procession on the prisoner's side of the door; remote starter first, percussion cap second and call request transponder third. This done, Moira withdraws her right hand, manages the best eye contact she can with the pink pinpricks within and makes a single stipulation.
“Get busy.”
A gruff noise, either a grunt or a growl, signals an acceptance and heralds the next and least pleasant of Moira's tasks.
Unsaddled with her late errand and its resultant cargo of knickknacks, Moira Quicksilver now intended to run down the nearest gaggle of guards, preferably armed, and pick the nastiest, noisiest fight possible. She rises to her feet, banishes any arrant thoughts of stealth and suddenly stomps out of sight of Cell 17P and its wordless occupant.
Moira dashes further down the hallway at full tilt, with both electrobatons extended and armed, visibly unafraid but inwardly anxious about the life-or-death calculations involved with this oncoming gambit. Her most conservative estimate placed at least another pair of guards, standing watch over the opposite service elevator, on this deck and the possibility of another two remained worryingly distinct. To date, Moira had never engaged more than three individual combatants at once and emerged victorious. Considering that any resistance she's likely to encounter would almost certainly be armed with more than electrified sticks, she doesn't necessarily like her odds.
She's, as always, afforded precious little time to fully contemplate these odds as she rounds a sloping corner onto, she guessed it, four individual prison guards, all loitering about the corridor in various states of repose, their bored conversation immediately interrupted and each only to happy to leap off their laurels to meet Moira's unspoken challenge.
She spends a second counting comparative distances, extrapolating estimable gaps between enemies' entrances into the fray and prays to all the moons she knows what she's doing.
Two batons, delivered as one directly to the side of his skeletal head, are more than sufficient motivation to entirely flatten the first prison guard to reach Moira, an unfortunate Gantor who ends his life with a moment's regret and a caved-in skull. Her introductions made, the two further guards unsling and cock their respective SV7s toward the charging Moira. Her momentum doesn't slacken when Moira hurls her left-hand electrobaton at the leftmost of the two marksman, a humanoid male who appears understandably astounded by the sparking projectile whizzing end over end toward him. Whether or not the tossed baton suitably distracts or even comes close to hitting him at all, Moira can't say as she immediately has the second guard, a Sybolo wheezing methane through a breathing apparatus and wielding a baton o
f his own, with which to concern herself at present.
A precision strike to his wrist clatters her enemy's weapon to the floor and, before the ectoplasmic prison guard can properly react, Moira's seized him by the scruff of his collar in one gauntleted fist and rammed the business end of her baton neatly beneath his chin, as though holding him at sword point. The Sybolo attempts physical protest, but the hissing tip of Moira's baton reminds him exactly how fragile his respiration equipment could be. At this moment, killing this idiot wasn't her main priority. Closing the gap between herself and either of the apart assault rifles was.
The roar of gunfire somewhere behind the Sybolo indicates to Moira the trigger-happiest of her armed options and, thrusting forth the unwilling guard as a squishy pink meat shield, she advances toward the thus far unmolested prison guard and his precious assault rifle. The continued sound of his firing, especially when contrasted against the yielding wet sounds of the Sybolo's skin popping, further indicates to Moira that this Gantor shares few of his former comrades scruples against shooting one's co-workers. She can only hope he retains some scruple against breaking regulation and shooting detainees that are practically asking for it.
By the time she's taken five steps, the Sybolo is little more than a ragged hunk of dead flesh, rent body armor and transparent blood, supported only by Moira's fist around his collar and Moira's baton at his throat. Upon hearing the telltale click of an emptied magazine, Moira commends the Sybolo for his sacrifice by pitching his corpse unceremoniously aside and risking the home stretch fully exposed. At sight of her, the Gantor rifleman, yet again a tall cadaverous razorback in riot armor, only just manages to cram another clip into the SV7's awaiting chamber. He levels the firearm point blank at her and Moira, a million mottibles away for all her electrobaton can avail her now, tries her hardest to contort her body in such a way as to minimize the grievous internal damage the oncoming laser bolt is likely to deal.
The Gantor squeezes the trigger, supercharged ditrogen plows a hole through her midsection and Moira Quicksilver, unsure if her fourth and possibly final gamble of the evening had actually paid off, crumples to the deck.