| From: | JOHN SPAIN <93135653@****.dcu.ie> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Frypp's last stand |
| Date: | Fri, 08 Dec 1995 21:00:24 +0000 (GMT) |
routine in school with both eyes shut on an hour of sleep.....
I can't figure out a way to do this at the same time, so I'll just
give you my eyeshots and then try to narrate. Try to figure out what
goes with what, I'm still not all here.
+++++ VID DOWNLOAD: FRYPP.RIP (325 mP)
Allright you've got the shots. Here's what lead up to them:
When Freddy got out of his coma, he had problems. "Shit shape" he
would have called it. Lots of neuro damage - had to expect it with a
black beetle - he lost fine motor control of his cyberarm and his
encephalon had gone south, but the worst was that he could not speak
anymore. That's why we had to wrap up his head in the demand vid.
He was just chewing some gum under there, I did the voiceover myself.
That caused problems. Freddy couldn't make cracks about people
anymore, so I think he was pretty depressed just from that alone. He
felt whoever beetled him, had robbed him. So he jumped to conclusions
and fingered the Occupation - who'd robbed him of just about
everything else... He went downhill. Rages. Crying fits. Not
pretty at all.
Only a few of us knew the full extent of his problems. The rest
assumed his silence was just agreement with the group. We got into a
pretty bad Groupthink spiral. Everyone was angry, no-one was
thinking.
When we put together the demand vid, we did not have much of a plan.
We were all too mad to think straight. We wanted revenge and we
wanted blood, lots of it.
I think between when we sent the vid to the media and when they
finally caught up to us, we killed about eight Marines or cops
straight away. We grabbed five others and tortured and mutilated
them. That's not something I was proud to be a part of. I still
can't believe we'd sunk to the level they'd always portrayed us at.
And of course things had gotten out of control. I think the final
tally - not counting our losses - was about twenty Marines and cops
killed to just shy of fifty metahumans and Occidentals killed when
people got leery about authority and authority got leery about people.
Eventually we decided on a plan. We were going to put together a
truck bomb and blow something up. We tossed around a lot of ideas
for targets: City Hall, the Imperial consulate, admin offices in the
Presidio, Marine barracks, but somehow we finally settled on the tank
farm at SFI. Maybe we thought we could make a symbolic strike
to stop the goverment bringing in more metahuman exiles and more
Imperial subjects. I don't know.... Groupthink.
We took a Mitsubishi-built garbage truck - looks quite a bit like the
Ares 'Master series that Shiawese uses in Seattle - and packed the
rear with explosives. We weakened the sides to try and direct the
explosion - Jacamus could explain it better than I can, if he were
here...
We had a couple of LandRovers left - the rest had been seized or
destroyed already - and formed up a small convoy and headed for the
airport. This's where the eyeshots start.
Freddy, Jac and I were in the lead truck - Spark was driving. The
bomb was behind us and there were two more Rovers behind it. Kabuki
Man was low out at sea with the Bumblebee, in case we needed fire
support getting out of the airport.
We had lots of stuff. Each of us had two guns and enough ammo to
choke a Hydra, grenades, flash-packs, flares and minimal armor. We
had so much other stuff, the armor weighed us down too much.
We even had a few LAWS and AVMs to breach the barrier they'd built to
stop someone from doing just what we were planning to do. A meter-
high ferrocrete wall all around the tank farm - inside the fence for
the airport proper - with a ten-ton retractable section at the gate.
Something happened - I'm still not sure what - I think an SFPD cruiser
recognized the 'Rovers, pure rotten luck. So this cop tries to pull
us over. What's Jacamus do? Rolls down the damn window and fires off
two clips into the car. If you don't recognize that gun, don't
worry, it's a Maxim design we've been field testing for a while now.
Absolute crap if you ask me. Jac tried using it as a sustained fire
weapon, firing one clip and changing the other. He did it, but he
also tore through his ammo too fast. Use your damn head and conserve
ammo. How many times did he pester us about counting rounds? Christ.
I was carrying another Maxim design, packed a punch without any
recoil, but I had to get too far away from my targets to be in with
the rest of us. Hell, I wouldn't be here if Freddy hadn't waved me
back to get a better range.....
Frankly, we were screwed. Right then and there. There would be
Marine blood on the street that day, but it would run together with
our own.
Traffic had stopped, needless to say. We were stuck. We couldn't
get up enough momentum to shoulder through the stopped cars, so we
bailed out. I hit the pavement just in time to see the first Marine
APC skid around a corner about a block up from where we were. The
kid on the gun musta been nervous - he just clamped down on his
triggers, firing into the people trying to get out of the way.
[If you look realy close in the eyeshots, you can see the crowd going
down, getting torn apart by the dual minigun streams. All but two
guys on motorcycles. One gets shredded like the rest, but he gets up
off of the concrete a moment later and staggers into a doorway. The
other drops the kickstand on his heavily damaged bike and calmly walks
to the sidewalk where he leans up against a streetlamp.]
We started taking losses, too. Spark hadn't cleared the driver's
seat when the minigun got us. He was gone in an instant. The fire
just - well you can see what it did to him.
[Pulped him. Not much left above the ribs.]
We formed up on the bomb, not a good idea, but that truck was the
most solid cover we could reach. I think we lost somebody else along
the way. We were hunkered down behind the truck, we could hear the
Marines dismount. As soon as the minigun fire stopped we stuck our
heads out and started trying to thin them out. We got a couple.
Armando got a lot. He was pulling pins on their grenades - sometimes
I wish I could toss spells like that.
They were taking pretty good losses, mostly from the grenades going
off at their feet - ours and theirs.
Then our luck changed. A grenade somebody tossed at the Marines came
back at us. It made a U-turn, I swear and landed behind us. Scip
and Fremont went down. We lost a lot of fire and our rear - just
when we didn't need to lose it. A Marine GPV got in behind us. It
had a Grand Dragon anti-tank missile launcher on the roof. We
cleared out as fast as we could - we knew what was coming. Sure
enough, they fired at the bomb. Don't know what happened though.
Jacamus said the thing should have gone off, sympathetically, but it
didn't, it just burned. The explosives he used should have exploded.
He just kept repeating that over and over again.
Then something came over us. I think there were only about six left
then. Jac and me, Freddy, Lady Die, Armando and some kid. I never
learned his name even. Jac just started chanting: "Frag, frag,
frag, this isn't the way it's suppossed to happen. Fuck it! We're
going!" Then he really went. "Fix bayonets! Charge the bastards!
Marines die tonight!" Then he repeated it all in Japanese. Which is
goofy, because I know his Japanese sucks.
We jumped up and started combat assaulting the damn Marines. I don't
know how, but it was beautiful. Something came over us. We just did
it without thinking. That's when Freddy waved me back. I tried to
find somewhere I could shoot without backing into Marines coming up
from behind. I wound up trying to shoot from out of an alley. I
wound up losing my line of sight behind all of the other people in
there.
That's about where the video of the battle ends. I could hear the
Japanese rallying. They were attacking with swords. I could hear
them. Something about our culture. We're just fixated on good
steel with a good edge I guess. I threw away my gun. I didn't
want them catching me when they mopped up. I tried to push through
the crowd. The street was littered with bodies. They had Freddy and
Jacamus on their knees, handcuffed, blindfolded and hobbled. They
were going through our dead. Somebody must've just been down,
beacuse they said they arrested three.
Then I felt like absolute drek. I scanned the crowd and saw the
biker leaning up against his lamp. I felt so bad. I just staggered
away and started running. I wanted to get away. I couldn't stand
the thought of abandoning them and leaving them to get executed.....
I think I ran for most of the afternoon.
Strange, about the blades. I can't stop wondering what it's like to
be killed by a sword. That one single killing slash that's such a
part of our history..... I'm looking at my great-great-grandfather's
sword right now. He carried it against the Nationalist Chinese. His
grandfather carried it against the Tokugawa. It's killed many times.
It will need to kill once again.
+++++ TRANSMISSION TERMINATED AT SOURCE]<<<<<
-- Majikthize (13:07:23 / 12-08-56)
