| From: | "Paul J. Adam" <shadowtk@********.DEMON.CO.UK> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | With a Peal of Thunda |
| Date: | Mon, 13 Jan 1997 21:42:35 +0000 |
+++++begin video
Lynch runs to the shot-up police cruiser, glances at the two occupants -
both hit a dozen times by heavy machine gun fire that punched cleanly
through the car's light armour - as he uses it for cover and aims at the
buildings, scanning for targets. Nothing moves and there's no return
fire, as other black-clad figures advance, moving in short rushes from
cover to cover, maintaining mutual support.
"Damn. Too easy, much too easy." he mutters to himself. "Kurtz, Imp, see
anything?"
"All clear." Kurtz sounds unflappable.
"Nothing." An edge of worry in Imp's voice too. "Not a damn thing."
Lynch sighs. "Imp, you see the HMG nest?"
"Got it. My snipers are covering it."
"Good." He runs through the employee car park to the bullet-pocked front
of the office building, checks inside the window: a woman lies very
still in a puddle of her own blood, a wounded man clutches his stomach
and moans, and Lynch vaults through the frame to disarm both.
"Inside. Two down." Lilith joins him and they begin to sweep the
office's ground floor, finding a dozen dead, wounded or terrified
people: Blade and Quinn take the upper floor. Only one tries to resist,
reaching for a pistol as Lilith turns her back, and she kills him before
he unfastens his holster snap: the offices are clear. No further
threats, and no Thunda.
Lynch sighs and calls on the general frequency. "Okay. Move the SWAT
guys up to cover this area, we'll get the wounded out." Lynch stands in
a doorway, regarding the main steelworks with suspicion. "And everyone
be fucking careful. Don't bunch up, stay in cover, watch the main works,
that's where the real trouble's going to be."
Another private frequency. "Storm Flight, anything?"
A female voice answers "Nothing. We're orbiting at one thousand yards.
News chopper is buzzing around, Storm Two warned it off but it won't
take the hint. No movement. No targets."
"What do you think?" asks Lilith, beside him.
"He's sitting inside there waiting for us to come to him and he's going
to ambush us hard when we go in. Here, he's trying to lull us, convince
us he's run already."
"And you don't think so?" Lilith seems to share his concern.
"No. He's here."
"Lynch, we got a problem here." D'Arkan sounds worried. "The top Star
guy's getting uppity, he thinks he's taking charge now, and he's already
sent his people forward. Cruisers and uniformed coming your way, they
think it's clear... I'm gonna shoot the sonofabitch..."
"WHAT?" Lynch moves around the building, rifle still held in his
shoulder. Several ambulances are and police cruisers are pulling up to
the offices, and many of the SWAT troops - and a number of other
officers - have clustered by the office front, passing out a wounded
man.
"What the hell...?" he says incredulously, then hits the radio. "Get
dispersed and move those ambulances back!"
"This is Captain Milhouse. The scene's under control, looks like just
ordinary criminals, so I'm-"
"Like hell is it under control! Get your people dispersed and get most
of them back! You're-"
A familiar voice booms, seemingly from all directions at once, and Lynch
falls as though his legs had just disappeared.
"LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
There is a thunderous roar of gunfire, like a wave breaking on a beach,
and smoke trails reach out from the steelworks, muzzle flashes winking
in its shadows and crannies. Men are hit and falling or diving for cover
everywhere. A police cruiser explodes in flame, and an ambulance is hit
squarely: an undramatic flash and puff of smoke marks the impact. All
this is seen in blurred instants as Lynch rolls to the wall of the
office building, fires three short bursts at the steelworks.
All ten channels of his headware register red UNAVAILABLE warnings,
though a wedge-shaped strobe on his tactical display shows the direction
of the powerful jammer. The car park is scattered with prone bodies,
some writhing in agony, others ominously still, and every vehicle in
sight seems to have been hit at least once, several burning sullenly.
A helicopter - spinning wildly, its tail rotor blown off - hits the
ground near the apartment buildings, the rotor blades flying loose. One
scythes into the tenement building. Another helicopter, this one in FBI
colours, swerves wildly in the air and an amazing cloud of flares spray
from it, a smoke trail veering away and missing.
Muzzle flashes wink from in and around the tenements, but the seems
almost useless against Thunda's storm of gunfire. Bullets ricochet off
the wall near Lynch and he fires back at the muzzle flashes, without
apparent effect.
"God damn God damn God damn...." he keeps repeating under his breath,
throwing himself through a window and moving through the shot-up
offices, finding the room where Lilith is crouched in a doorway and
Blade by a window. Both turn as he comes in, then relax.
"Don't waste your ammo. Sentry guns, mostly." says Blade with disgust.
"The LAW shooters popped up, fired, pulled back already. I made it eight
at most."
"We're going in to clean the steelworks. All ready?"
"You're crazy." Lilith smiles at him, though.
"We're dead if we don't, he's dug in like a flea on a devil rat. We
can't call up air or arty because too many of ours are caught here. And
until we nail that jammer we can't call for anything."
"Okay. I'll get the others." Blade moves off, staying below the window
line, returns followed by Quinn and Easy a few moments later.
"What's the plan?"
"We go in and nail that jammer. Anyone gets in our way, we kill them.
Then, when we've got comms back, we figure out what the hell happened to
everyone else and what to do next."
"Easy in, easy out." drawls Lilith.
"Yeah. Right. That entrance there, inside and shoot at anything
hostile." Lynch takes a deep breath, brings out two grenades. "Smoke and
sprint." The others do likewise. "Ready! Go!" The grenades burst with
muffled coughs and the fifty-yard gap is suddenly choked with white
smoke, and Lynch runs through it flat-out, bullets zipping off the
asphalt and cracking by his head.
He runs into a cavernous hall crammed with strange machinery, great egg-
shaped converters squatting like alien idols in each corner, and as he
races towards one - bullets clanging into the walls - a surprised-
looking man is raising a Mossberg shotgun as Lynch butt-strokes him in
the face, then as he staggers fires a short burst into him; Lynch
presses himself against the base of the converter, breathing hard, then
leans back around, Two men are running along a high catwalk, firing at
someone else, and Lynch picks both off with single shots, one man
falling with a despairing scream to hit the concrete floor.
Bullets slap into the converter and Lynch ducks, then a grenade
explosion erases the source of the shots. Lilith passes him, leaping up
onto the pipework and ducting that surrounds the converter: he moves out
into view, raking the gloomy hall with gunfire as she runs with feline
grace and balance along the nightmare tangle of pipes - someone fires at
her and Lynch sprays that area, rewarded with a scream - then Lilith is
firing down at something then jumping down out of sight. An engine
starts up somewhere, and another explosion sends shards of shrapnel
skittering around, screams and yells ended by gunfire. Lynch riddles a
dark corner with a full magazine of ammunition, as the engine revs and
tyres squeal.
He moves out into the clearer central area as a Bison roars past him, a
man and a woman visible in the open side door firing at him and Lynch
falling, firing back and the man's face disappears in a spray of blood.
Rising, he continues to riddle the back of the vehicle to no apparent
effect until his rifle clicks empty and the Bison swerves out of sight:
Lynch rolls into cover and shoves a fresh magazine into place, rises to
his feet and limps rapidly forward to join Lilith where she's covering
the room's shadows and another wide door, mostly blocked by a huge
cylinder laid on tracked bogies, like a distorted ICBM.. Gunfire, more
distant, echoes.
"Exit there, into the smelter. At least two got out there. You're hurt."
she says softly.
"I'm functional. Where are the others?"
"Four other bad guys retreated that way after I cut this exit off." She
indicates the direction of the gunfire. "Blade, Easy and Quinn went
after them." A grenade explodes and someone screams.
"Poor bad guys." Lynch moves cautiously forward, standing by the wall
near the ceramic cylinder - a torpedo, an insulated vessel for moving
molten pig iron from the smelters to the converters. twice as tall as
him. The only way into the next area is by crawling underneath it, but
what seems to interest him more is that the jamming strobe has been
shrinking as he moves and the signal gets triangulated, until it's a
fuzzy blot centred on that cylinder.
"Found the jammer." He indicates the torpedo. "In there."
"Cunning. Means we have to go through his ambush to get to it."
Lynch regards the sheet-metal wall critically. "No, we don't." Backing
away, he aims and fires a long burst, Lilith joining in when she sees
the strikes, blowing a ragged outline of bullet holes into the wall.
Return fire clangs and echoes, someone blindly firing back: Lynch
changes magazines, crawls forward to tape two grenades to the wall,
setting the timers and crawling, then running, back.
The explosions are deafening and smoke billows, the blind fire into the
opening thus blasted almost frantic from several weapons: then Lilith
throws two of her own through, saying softly "Eyes", and Lynch shields
his face with his arm. The pulses of light are still intense enough to
leak around his arm and backlight his eyelids, two reddish flares, then
Lynch is running through the ragged opening.
Inside is a dark nightmare tangle of ruined equipment, the remains of a
smelter after a major accident. Tumbled equipment and mangled pipework
fills the hangar-like space which had once held four blast furnaces,
until one exploded. A woman is still pawing at her eyes when Lynch
shoots her twice in the head; he finds cover before regarding the open
mouth of the converter with satisfaction, and throwing in his last hand
grenade. Smoke belches from its mouth, and the red warnings of jamming
disappear in an instant.
"Lilith?" he subvocalises. "BattleTac coming back on line. Cover me."
She does just that, bracing by the ragged hole in the wall as Lynch
crouches, trying to find out what's going on outside.
+++++end video
One more to go, but it's a big chunk.]<<<<<
-- The Mighty Quinn <21:43:31/01-13-58>
