NEWS

Alea Iacta Est (IC)

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Tecumseh

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« Reply #105 on: <06-23-17/0136:17> »
Swoopy limps around the Dragon and confirms the complete and total absence of parachutes. Perhaps it's just as well, given the blizzard. It might be better just to stay low to snowy cornfields and jump out if the propellers fall off . Staying low might help you stay off radar too, which could buy you a few precious seconds in case those Thunderhawks and Gryphons coming out of McConnell AFB catch up with you. Home is only minutes away.

Ité had programmed his Fairlight Excalibur to send a signal to the detonators when they were half a klick away. Boosted by a pleasant tailwind, the Dragon quickly covers the half kilometer, breaking the tether. Suddenly the sky is lit up by dual orange plumes. They are bright enough that, looking back, you can see the savaged remains of the scarred base. There is an unnatural crater in the middle of the base, with the edges rapidly expanding. Ité had mentioned trying to overload the underground nanoforges as a contingency plan. It seems that he succeeded, perhaps so spectacularly that the radar installation would have been swallowed into the earth if they hadn't been blown up first. Still, better safe than sorry. The shattered dishes collapse, then implode their structural foundations in a fiery heap.

The mood should be celebratory, but instead it is dampened - literally - by a shower of blood from Ité. An improvised trepanning is unusual even for Wildcats, especially when it's your comrade-in-arms under the knife. The metal flooring of the Dragon shakes violently under Ité as Shiriki does his best to navigate the powerful winds. With little more that he can do for Ité, Dan-Dan turns his attention to Swoopy's wound. It is deep but it is clean, with no jagged tearing or scorching or broken bone fragments that would complicate matters. The treatment is straightforward, despite the wound's severity. Within minutes, Swoopy is being repaired from the inside out by modern medicine, no magic necessary.

Despite being less than 10km from home, Chante does not relax. She stands at the rear gun port, her hands on the Stoner-Ares M202, even if it only has 10 rounds remaining, because her Ares Alpha is somewhere behind them in the snow. No, what's concerning Chante isn't so much the GMC Thunderhawks and Gryphons, or the Panther assault canons that were in the base's inventory, or what her superiors might say about Ité's condition, but rather the rather large, rather angry fire spirit that's bobbing along behind them on the astral, just out of reach but not out of sight.

END CHAPTER ONE