The few of you who don't bounce back from plane crashes like they're as common as Family Guy reruns get out of their harnesses and shakily start to gather and check the jumbled equipment.
"Why... why aren't we dead?" Kang asks.
"Inertial dampers," Swims replies, patting the crash couches. "And a pilot good enough to bring us down with no engines."
"Now you know why we call them crashers," Arketta says.
As it turns out, Zaef wasn't just good enough to bring the manta down with its crew and passengers intact, he was good enough to keep the gear that wasn't scattered by the killdrone impacts stowed in the crates. The ATV and trailer, packed to carry the heavy, unwieldy GateKeg and supply crates, are in working order. One of the two spare water tanks are unholed. This, along with the weapons crates and Keg go on the ATV. The Groi reactor lozenge floats under its own power, and is lashed to the ATV as well.
The personal weapons supply has survived as well. Eight Stingers, six AT-4s, and 20 Claymores are recovered from the manta's burst compartments.
Judging from Zaef and Luis' best guesses, you should be a few days' march from the Wherren village to the southeast.
"And he ain't gonna jump no more," Hugh mutters to himself. His safety harness is stuck from the crash; he draws his knife and cuts himself loose. In a few minutes, he's going to notice the dull pain of having bumped his head against the crasher on impact.
"Everybody who's kept their trap shut so far sound off for a head check," Hugh says, snapping into command mode. "Stanhill, give everyone a quick once over, I don't want anyone walking into the jungle with untreated injuries. Zaef, good thinking on the perimeter but I need someone here to set the manta up for a self-destruct, make sure that the killdrones and sunballs aren't scavenged. Sarge" - he nods to Semo, his de-facto second in command - "grab a few people and make sure you beach the ATV without spilling any gear. Get us ready to move. Angel and Cowboy, you're with me, we're gonna climb out there and secure the perimeter, make sure we don't have any surprises incoming."
Angel grunts as the Manta hits dirt, slamming the release on his crash harness and pulls himself free.
"Yessir" comes the short, terse reply to the order to secure the perimeter.
Using the rather impressive hole a killdrone smashed in the manta as a workable exit, he takes up his rifle and slides out of the crashed vehicle, moving clear in a low, fast crouch before taking cover behind a tree, scanning the forest.
(OOC: I didn't get to post the things I wanted to before, what with flying back from vacation, all the craziness around that and other reasons that you know about, so I'm putting it up here. Adam, do with it as you see fit.
During the dogfight)
As the Manta spins, dives and swerves, it's all Davis can do to keep from blacking out. He closes his eyes and thinks back to Atea and Ngawai, back to before his stomach was trying to leap out of his throat. He grins at the display of machismo from the soldiers on board.
"We really are just the craziest bunch of idiots this galaxy has ever seen, huh?" he shouts to Swims.
"Yes... I am very glad to be here," the big Wherren replies. Strapped into the crasher like he is and unable to fully convey nuanced meanings, it's hard to tell if he's being sarcastic or not.
Davis laughs through gritted teeth. "Why is that?"
"Because it appears I will get to die at home," he says as killdrones whip past outside.
"Fair enough," Davis says, and goes back to trying to stay conscious.
----
(OOC: After the crash)
Davis has been in a few hard crashes in ground vehicles before, but never from the air. Still, the crashers made it no worse than the time he was rear-ended by a drunken Citroen in Kabul, and he's unstrapped and checking to make sure all his favorite limbs are still attached before Kang has even figured out which way is up.
After a bit of scrounging, he finds his kit bag and pulls out a vox, and checks his harness and sidearm while the vox boots up. Everything seems to be there, so Davis unhooks his SCAR-H from the mounts behind his crasher. He looks at the gear, and breathes a sigh of relief when not only is it all still here, but the crates containing the weapons, ammunition and supplies are still in one piece. That could have been really bad.
As Zaef walks past, Davis reaches into a pouch and pulls out a $20 bill. He taps the pilot on the shoulder and hands it to him. "Narsai tradition: always tip the pilot after a good landing," Davis says with a wink and a smile.
Zaef looks at the money quizzically, then looks around the ship for a moment. There are rips and tears the size of a man torn through the hull, Kang is being helped onto his feet by Arketta and the Alef-ka (Swims-the-Dark, or something), explosives scattered around his feet, and the crate containing the mission essentials still securely ensconced. Everyone is disoriented, but alive, and lucky to be so. Only the anti-personal equipment locker storage was blown, everything is exactly where it's supposed to be. Except the damn ship.
Zaef turns back to the man (Day-Vis? Davis? Dave-Is?) and accepts the tip, replying in English. "Thank you. I hope I never find out what a 'bad landing' is." Then he looks at the money and asks, "How much coke would this buy?"
"Hey, you got us down here in one piece and all the equipment's intact. I'd call that one hell of a landing job with a Manta that's shot full of holes. When Brinai recommended you to me, she knew what she was doing." Davis says in Imperial, and points at the $20 bill. "I think you earned every cent of that. It'll get you 18 Cokes or so, too."
Zaef chuckles. "No wonder you Narsai'i are at the forefront of the fight. You think your lives are worth 18 Cokes."
Davis laughs along with Zaef. "And there's more where that came from," he says.
"The ship might even survive next time," Zaef says.
---
(OOC: After the status check)
Davis's vox beeps to let him know it's fully online, and he quickly navigates to the mapping software. The vox asks him what planet he's on, and after selecting Whirr, the device thinks for a fraction of a second, bringing up the saved Imperium map of Whirr and loading the geomagnetic presets for the planet. Davis selects the region nearby their target village, and the vox computes the declination and using its internal compass, tells the spy roughly what direction is north. More precise triangulation will have to wait.
"Hey, Captain Verrill, when we're done loading up, I've got the map up and running, but we need to climb a tree and find some landmarks if we're going to figure out where we need to go. Once we blow this sucker and get some distance away, we need to take a peek above the treeline."
"Roger that, Davis," Hugh says. "Keep me posted on whether that thing picks up any comm traffic in the area, and double-check that we're not broadcasting anything."
Davis scans his vox across the available frequencies and picks up some surface traffic. It's encrypted, but Davis figures it's probably Imperial survivors trying to communicate and regroup.
Semo quickly falls to loading the ATV. Swims, the other huge beast on the team, helps out with the keg and heavier crates. The ATV will be bothersome and loud, but it should handle Whiirr's terrain without too much complaint. The same can't be said for the people. The manta was air-conditioned. Outside, it is hot and humid, probably in the 90s, and with little breeze inside the sweltering canopy.
Zaef and Luis see about the demolition of the manta. Extracting the killdrones and sunballs is a process that would require specialized equipment, and the time it would take to juryrig the gear to do the job would take far too long and be far too dangerous, not to mention the extra encumbrance the ship weaponry would add. So Luis rigs the killdrone stores to a remote timer without using too much of his packed demo supplies - the manta's ammo should provide all the boom they need to do the job.
Meanwhile, Hugh, Cowboy, and Angel stalk the perimeter of the crash site. Whiirr's white sun burns down through the leaves, creating moving patterns of light that play off the unfamiliar flora. Angel compares what he feels now to his first trip to the lush planet, and finds that he no longer feels that minute unnatural animal fear brought on by the unknown. Cowboy, however, thought he stunk after Brazil. He's been outside for three minutes and his BDUs are already soaked. Still, a part of him is happy to be out on foot, out of his crasher-straps and no longer with his life in anyone else's hands but his own. Hugh's thinking the situation over. His team's all here, they still have their mission-critical gear, and they've got quite a headstart towards the Wherren village. Hugh and his two Deltas don't spot anything more suspicious than a few curious animals sniffing around some wreckage or cautiously returning to find smashed burrows and nests.
"Looks clear to me," Hugh says after a minute of scanning the surroundings. They seem to be alone still, but he knows that they can't afford to sit around and wait for the bad guys to come looking. He looks to Cowboy and Angel, who nod off on their sectors.
"Alright," Hugh says, lowering his rifle. "We should get moving, we're burning daylight. Cowboy, I hear you've got more experience with this snake eater crap than the rest of us, so how about you take point on the convoy?"
"Alright," Hugh says, lowering his rifle. "We should get moving, we're burning daylight. Cowboy, I hear you've got more experience with this snake eater crap than the rest of us, so how about you take point on the convoy?"
"You heard the man, let's move out. We're burning daylight and got a ways to go." chopping down the first of many, many vines and clearing a path for the rest.
"Hey, Luis, when you're done wiring the ship to blow, I want you to take a look at my vox, see if you can make any headway on their crypto," Davis says, letting the vox hang from its lanyard on his vest. He takes a deep drink from his Camelback and refills it from the holed water tank.
The team moves out, with Cowboy on point and Angel trailing. Their first stop is near the edge of Luis' remote trigger's range. There's ample cover and no hostile contact so far, so Luis shrugs and activates the demo charges.
Man, that was cool.
With the manta and its payload well and truly scuttled and the euphoria of well-placed explosives wearing off, it's time for you to move once more, this time just far enough to where someone can climb a tree and figure their position. Cowboy may be one of the new guys, but he's clearly used to the wilderness. The man keeps his machete-work to a minimum, easily finding nigh-invisible paths and routes through the curling, twisted alien jungle. The ATV is both burden and salvation; noisy and smelly, but without it you would have no way to move the supply crates - vital for trade and goodwill with the natives - or the Groi keg - currently your only ticket home. At least Cowboy is finding a relatively easy path for the four-wheeler and its small trailer.
A miserable, hot, and cautious half-hour later, it's time to stop and check your bearings. Luis uses the hike to fiddle with Davis' vox and see if he can passively pick up and decrypt the Imperial transmissions. He's still working on it by the time it's time to stop, and it doesn't look like it's the font of information Davis was hoping for. A few scattered maydays from a handful of mantas that made it to the surface in varying states of fucked, a lot of traffic from the research site, and only a short burst from the enemy manta's crash site about 20 minutes ago. Whatever the survivors said, they've gone dark for now. Luis knows voxes have far more range and versatility than cellphones or radio, but on planet with absolutely no infrastructure like Whiirr, even they have limitations. Once of those limitations is that there's only so much he can do without sending data, and he's not about to do that.
Cowboy slings his machete for a moment, letting the column catch up as he takes a swig of water from his camelback.
*checks his watch*
"Anyone have any idea on how long the day is on this Crotchcooker™ planet? We've been hiking for a while and I want to get camp set up before it gets nice and dark."
"20 hours, 32 minutes," Hugh answers, then checks his watch. "We really need to figure out a way to make clocks that synchronize to exoplanet days. Anyway, sun's pretty high, so...I figure we have about three more hours of good daylight."
Hugh sets an alarm on his watch.
"When this goes off, we need to start looking for a campsite. But I want to make as much headway as we can, put distance and time between us and where the bad guys will start looking when they get their shit together."
He looks around at the team, his gaze stopping briefly on Zaef.
"I need a map update and location before we push further, though. One volounteer to scale a tree, the rest of you hydrate yourselves."
Zaef nods at Hugh and, after a couple seconds of sucking some water through the weird tube device, wipes the sweat off his hands and starts climbing the nearest tree.
Zaef scampers up a nearby tree trunk, clambers onto a thick branch, and is soon up out of sight above a curtain of green-blue fronds. The guy must get it from crawling through starships in odd positions. The rest of the team sucks down water. It's planned to be a fairly long mission, and everyone knows at some point they'll be switching over to filtered local water but it's nice to have enough Earth H2O for a while at least.
Above the forest floor it's like another world. Zaef knows Wherren don't generally have an easy time climbing anything; the range of mid-canopy wildlife is truly breathtaking. Some more than others, as it turns out. The ex-Arena favorite pulls himself up to a branch and comes face-to-beak with an honest-to-Groi akwhela! Zaef's knife is in his hand in a flash, fast enough to ward off the deadly avian predator's startled reactive bite. The big not-really-a-bird takes a second swipe at Zaef on its way to a quieter nesting spot. Zaef's left dangling by one hand on a tree branch, a little shaken up but none the worse for wear. He puts away his knife and straining, gets a second handhold on the tree. From there it's an easy trek up to a fork at the top of the tree. The Whiirr sun is blindingly bright after being under forest cover for so long. It takes Zaef a moment to adjust, but he's easily able to pinpoint their location with Davis' vox and record the coordinates into the machine. He can see the smoky remains of Luis' demolitions work to his northwest; beyond that there's a faint smudge of the same belonging to the Imperial manta they downed. He doesn't see or hear any other craft in the sky. Zaef checks their direction of travel next. The lazy river they'd been using as a landmark thus far forks a few miles downriver; luckily for the ATV, the team appears to be on the same side as the Wherren village. The immediate terrain as far as Zaef can see ranges from "jungle" to "thick jungle".
Coordinates found, area scouted. Zaef carefully works his way back down through the canopy.
Zaef comes sliding down a completely different trunk than the one he climbed up.
Angel takes a sip of water from his canteen and grunts, impressed, as the Imperial comes down from an entirely unexpected direction.
He I like...
The scout eyes the trees quietly, actually enjoying the scenery. Spend enough time in a place, apparently it stops feeling alien. Even if its a damned alien world.
Davis catches the vox as Zaef tosses it down to him before he drops the last bit to the ground. "Thanks, Zaef." He clips the vox back into his harness and takes a look at the screen. "We're on the right side of the river, that's good. We have to go...that way," Davis says, pointing towards the direction indicated on the vox for the village. He tries to figure out if they can make it to the village by nightfall, or failing that, find a place for them to camp.
"Yessir!" Semo snaps a quick salute. Turning, he heads off with Swims to debark the vehicle and get it loaded with the gatekeg and other large equipment.
Soon they're moving out, so Semo takes shotgun on the ATV with Swims driving. With the XM-25 in his hands, this would be a bad time for the remaining Turai to show up.
You march on. Cowboy leads the team through the thick foliage with a practiced woodsman's eye. The ATV's engine noise creates a sort of sonic wake that appears to be doing a fine job at frightening off most of the native wildlife, but make no mistake, the rustling flutters from fauna high above and the flickering reflections of light in some half-seen critter's eyes are a constant reminder that here, humans may not be at the top of the food chain. After several hours of trudging through what looks like the exact same alien forest, the shadows grow deeper and darker and the pinpoints of sunlight stretch and dim. The animal noises change, with a growing chorus of otherworldly avians welcoming the sunset.
Davis' map shows another day or day and a half to the Wherren village. You should arrive at the river tomorrow, and then you can follow the bank all the way down.
Hugh's watch beeps just in time for the sun to sink into a vague golden haze breaking through the trees.
"I was wondering when that'd go off," he mumbles to himself. "Damn, it's quicker than I remember."
"We should start making camp," Hugh says. His gaze wanders to Zaef. "Hey, Zaef, can you get on a tree again? I'd like to know how the approaches to our campsite look." His next nod goes to Angel. "Once we've got likely approaches, we should set up some Claymores and tripwires." And finally, Semo. "Sarge, it shouldn't be too hard to find firewood around here, grab a couple guys for that. The rest of you, we need to set up the rain roof, hang hammocks and clear some ground for the fire."
Admiral Duck Sauce
