Gamer Story XIX (FS)
I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement. This campaign was set in the Fading Suns setting.
“ Damn, its cold,” Elvis shivered as the Templars slogged along across the tundra. Julka, Malignatius’ moon, hung overhead, a dim oval made fuzzy by its terra-formed atmosphere.
“Well, it was nice and warm back in the Dark Base,” Remmie reminded him. “Remember how the Singularity Furnace kept us toasty ?”
“Do I.” Elvis shuddered hard. “I swear, I could feel it turning my bone marrow into mold. I never, ever want to be on the same planet as one of those.”
“Well, in about two hours the one on this planet will be a cloud of singed atoms,” Red remarked happily. “That fusion device will clean ‘em out.”
“Us, too, if we don’t step it off,” Quinn gasped. “Its got a blast radius of six miles, even three hundred feet under the bedrock. And we’re still only two miles away from it.”
“Its those blasted hoppers,” Elvis muttered, scanning the darkened sky. “They’re cutting into our escape time.”
***
Protos Sir Julius Li Halan, knight and brethren in good standing with the Sanctuary Aeon branch of the Church, slogged alongside the KICKER unit, a folding mesh sheet the size of a stretcher supported at waist height by two small anti-gravity units. The unit supported Tank, who had taken two Dark Rounds in the side, and while neither had unleashed their unholy warheads, the wounds themselves were deep; and Tim, who had been hit by two huge rounds, one of which had blown his left arm off at the forearm. The other had mangled his chest and possibly damaged his spine; Tim’s future was uncertain, although it was certain that if they did not get him someplace warm soon, he wasn’t going to make it.
The IR goggles on passive mode really weren’t that much of an improvement over the naked eye, but Damarus did not dare activate the unit’s IR beam; they had bumped into a patrol while searching out a good place to plant their bomb, and the resulting firefight had gotten Tim badly shot up, and the alarm raised. Breaking through a defensive barricade had used up the last of their grenades and a lot of ammunition. Tank had been badly wounded, and Cody had advised him that they were running low on medical supplies. Upon reaching the surface, with the fusion bomb counting down behind them, they had discovered hoppers circling overhead, searching.
It had all started with a letter from a distant relative who claimed to have dirt on the Decados rulers of Malinatius, once a Li Halan planet, now a Decados fief. Acting on the information in the letter, the Templars had gone to Julka, the planet’s terra-formed moon, to contact a prisoner of the gulags there.
On Julka they had been caught up in a Dark-based prisoner uprising, and had barely fought their way free. They had gone to meet this relative, only to walk into an ambush. Damarus was ready to chuck the whole matter when he woke up one morning to find a business card stuck to his forehead.
Which was how he had met Joni Lethco, a curvy Jacobin agent who, but for the timely intervention of Ragnar, would have conducted the briefing in bed. As it was, she had informed Damarus that the family member was now a follower of the Dark, dug into an old Second Republic military base in a remote area of Malignatius. House Decados did not want the controversy of taking out a Li Halan holdout, so the Templars, as an Imperial force, agreed to take the job. Lethco provided a fusion device to destroy the base, and information on a hidden entrance (an old power conduit).
Except that she had not mentioned, if indeed she had known, that the base had a fully operational Singularity Furnace, a Dark-fueled engine of unholy power which was making an army of Undead possible, and was fueling the construction of a Black Gate.
***
The sudden explosion of gunfire sent the Templars sprawling into the snowy turf as Dark Rounds whipped past their heads.
Cursing, Nick dodged to the right and sprinted up on line, crashing to the ground and rolling twice in case any of the shooters were tracking him. Snapping the bipod legs out, he braced the his SAW and ripped off two long bursts at the muzzle flashes dancing in a ragged line ahead.
“You’ll be all right!” Cody yelled to the wounded Tank above the gunfire. “Stay down.”
Someone screamed further down the firing line. The medic gave Tank a reassuring pat and got to his feet, firing blindly with his pistol as he raced to the sound of pain. He always fired his pistol when he ran; he doubted he ever got close to hitting anyone as he never bothered to aim, or even look in the direction he was shooting, but it made him feel better about being upright in a firefight.
And he needed all the good feelings he could muster: they were still within the blast radius of the bomb, whose timer was steadily ticking down the seconds, and they had just walked into a neatly-deployed Dark patrol. But for Ragnar’s keen nose they would have been chopped up; as it was both Damarus and Red were badly wounded.
***
Big Thunder bucked and roared, spewing rifled slugs at the Necromutants lying prone on the tundra forty yards away. One shivered and flopped as the heavy projectiles smashed its corpse-body apart, but the sight was little consolation to Quinn: his last drum of slugs was nearly empty, and the few buckshot rounds he had left were useless at this range. He had seen Ragnar swapping empty pistols for full, and then reloading the second pair; ammunition consumption had been heavy, made worse by the fact that everyone was carrying less in order to bring along silenced SMGs. The silenced weapons had not been needed because the noise generated by the Furnace and associated machinery drowned out all but the heaviest gunfire.
***
“BASTARDS!” Remmie screamed, awkwardly ramming a stripper clip of caseless rounds into his Nightstorm assault weapon. A Dark Round had blown most of his left ring finger off; Cody assured him it could be re-attached, but the pain was killing him.
***
“We got ‘em all,” Nick dropped to one knee by Damarus. “How ya doin’ capt’n?”
“I’ll live.” Damarus forced himself to sit up and look as a knight should. “How’s Remmie’s hand?”
“Doc got the finger back on. Looks like they got one of them ground radars set up, vectored these stiffs right into our path,” Nick grinned mirthlessly. “Better hope we’re off the screen, ‘cause ammo’s getting tight.”
“We’ll make it.” Damarus levered himself to his feet, keeping the pain from showing by years of Li Halan training. “And we had best get started right now.”
***
“Six miles,” Quinn sagged onto the tundra, gasping for air. “We’re safe.”
“Not hardly,” Hal grabbed him and heaved the burly Tech to his feet. “Six miles is an estimate. We need to get some extra space between us and the bomb.”
“Well, screw me,” Quinn sobbed.
“Thanks, maybe later.”
***
“Fifteen minutes to detonation,” Hal called. “Everybody stop, pick as big a hump as you can find, and dig in on the west side of it, pile the dirt to the east.”
“Dig with what?” Elvis wanted to know as Quinn collapsed behind a rock the size of a loaf of bread. “Damarus made us leave the tools behind, the bastard.”
“Watch your mouth, boy.” Hal loomed over the Tech. “That’s Captain Sir Damarus to the likes of you.” He pulled the heavy fighting knife from his LBV. “Use your knife.”
“I don’t have a knife,” Elvis pointed out peevishly.
“Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?” the Marine grinned as he moved on down the line. “Come on Quinn, start digging.”
“Bite me.”
“Its your funeral.”
“Anything’s better than being here.”
“ ‘It’s Captain Sir Dam-I’m-a-moron’,” Elvis mimicked under his breath. “Piss off, you bald bastard. I’m surprised we didn’t go ‘ten more feet’.”
***
Despite being seven and a half miles from the base, the shock wave rolled over the Templars with gale force, a graphic example of what could have happened to them had they been closer.
Two hours later an airship was making its approach, and the battered band limped away from yet another battlefield.
