Chapter 10: chapter ten

Sighter let out a blast of flame at one of the aliens. The combatant dodged his attack, letting the fire hit the wall for minimal damage.

Shade tried to punch her enemy. Her blow landed on an armored arm and slid off to no effect.

“All right,” said Stan. “It's Nick's third attack. I think everybody but Punch has used up all of their attacks. He gets two more, then we roll initiative again.”

“I'm going to drop the freeze ray, and pull my smartgun,” said Nick. “That will take up my attack.”

“All right,” said Stan. “George?”

“I'm going to try to knock my guy out so we'll be up two out of five, and then knock out the one with the locked up leg,” said George.

“Go ahead and roll, and then we'll do initiative,” said Stan.

Punch swung a right, then left combination at his target. The right missed, directed away by a hand. The left came in and put the alien down with a busted helmet. The helmet was the only reason the alien's head hadn't been turned to mush, but it hadn't saved the alien from being knocked out by the blow.

The other three aliens looked at the hero in shock. He grinned at them.

The group rolled for initiative again. Stan came out on top so the aliens moved first against the heroes.

Two of the guards fired at Punch to put him down before he put them down. The third flicked a blade from its gauntlet and stabbed Shade in the chest.

“I think I'm dead,” said Gail. “Critical damage to the chest.”

“I still have the first aid kit with the nanomachines,” said Nick. “If you can get to the end of the round without getting hurt any more than what you are already, I can use that to give you back four d six worth of points.”

“I'm going to simo both of these guys shooting at me with a flying ram,” said George. “They can't hurt me, and Nick can do the paramedic thing on his attack.”

“Roll to hit,” said Stan. “Gail, you're up after that.”

Punch leaped across the space, hands out in front of him. He slammed into both of the aliens as their energy bursts wrecked his McWeeny shirt even more. The aliens flew into the wall and slid to the floor.

Shade punched the exposed face of her enemy. His head exploded on impact. She pushed the body away. The knife came out of her chest as he fell to the floor.

“That takes care of that,” said Jonah. He let his hex bolt fade. “Punch and I should go ahead, while you three head back outside and Shade gets looked at by a doctor.”

“Not doing that,” said Shade. She checked the wound. It looked bad to her, but she didn't know how bad.

“Give me a second,” said Gadget. He holstered his smart gun and checked his equipment vest. He pulled a black box from a pouch. He applied that to Shade's wound. He grabbed some tape from his belt, and taped it in place. “Just keep that on, and it should heal you up in a couple of minutes.”

“So I can keep going?,” said Shade. She grimaced at the blood on her sweat shirt.

“It'll take a couple of minutes for you to come up to snuff,” said Gadget.

“That's fine,” said Shade. “You guys can do the heavy lifting until this is over.”

Gadget worked on his freeze ray. He used that to imprison their captives in blocks of ice after making sure they didn't have any weapons they could use to get free of their frozen cells.

“Let's keep going to the engine room,” said Gadget. “Maybe we can take control of the ship from there.”

“And if we can keep them from blowing up more of the city, that would be a bonus,” said Jonah.

“It would be a good outcome,” said Gadget. “We could take their tech and put our own ships out there.”

“We can worry about that when we have everything locked down,” said Jonah. “They might be trying to place a bomb in their engine room to keep us from stopping them from doing something stupid.”

“They wouldn't do that,” said Gadget. “How would they get home?”

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“What makes you think they are planning on going home?,” asked Shade.

“If they blow this thing up in the city, it will be like dropping a nuke,” said Gadget. “And we have the other two to worry about too.”

“And they are in worse shape than this one,” said Shade. “We might be looking at three nukes going off in the city.”

“So we should hurry and make sure they can't do that,” said Sighter. He scanned the corridor ahead. “It looks clear from what I can see.”

“If they lost their water during their collision, they might have been more worried about that than fixing it so their ships could be destroyed,” said Gadget.

“We can't plan for something like that,” said Jonah. “We need to deal with this, and then get over there and deal with the other two. Maybe they'll ask for help leaving the planet. Maybe they'll fight to the end. We can't plan on that. We're going with the flow now.”

“If it does turn to suicide, they can hold us off until they can rig the system,” said Gadget.

“How can we buy time to keep them from blowing you up?,” asked Punch. He walked ahead in case the aliens came at them.

“If we had some way of blowing up engineering from here, that might buy us enough time to seize things and lock the aliens out of their own systems,” said Gadget. “I don't know how we could do that from what I can see. I'd need time to study the layout.”

“All of these conduits would have to go down there, right?,” said Jonah. He pointed at the piping on the walls.

“In a Earth ship, maybe,” said Gadget.

Jonah pointed at the mechanical works and hexed them. He had wanted there to be some kind of feedback into engineering to slow the aliens from doing anything crazy. Instead part of the piping fell to the floor, the joins broken from instant rust.

“That didn't go like I wanted,” said Jonah. He pointed and tried again on the exposed wiring.

The strands of coral beads in insulated wrapping blew apart as the heroes watched. Everyone looked at Jonah. He shrugged. He was bound to get lucky once.

Sighter went to the end of the pipe and looked down it. He shook his head.

“All of that stuff is gone,” said Sighter. “If they want to do anything now, they are going to have to do it with whatever they have next to the engines.”

“That buys some time for us to get down there and find the door,” said Gadget. “Not to mention getting in and seeing what they have to stop us.”

“I would rather not get stabbed again,” said Shade.

“I don't know what I can do about that,” said Gadget.

A squad of aliens in suits controlled the area at the end of the corridor. Sighter spotted their shadows before they spotted the invading humans and opened fire. He held up a hand to tell the others to stop.

He crept forward and took a peek. He crept back and gestured for the others to move back out of earshot.

“There's four of them with a big gun in an open space in front of a big door. All of the other corridors on this deck seem to end in that space,” said Sighter. “They are going to light us up as soon as we show our faces.”

“I got this,” said Punch. “You guys think about how we can open the door.”

“Is there some kind of keypad on the side of the door,” said Gadget. “We can use that if we can hack it.”

“The goofs were in the way,” said Sighter. “I didn't see anything like that from the look I took.”

“Punch distracts them, and then we run up and take them out,” said Shade. “Then Jonah fouls the door. We're in.”

“That sounds so easy, we can't mess it up,” said Gadget.

“Let's see how bad we can mess it up,” said Jonah. “Still, it seems like the least dangerous thing we've done so far. I'm for it.”

“So am I,” said Gadget.

“Let's do this before we lose surprise on these mooks,” said Punch. “Just follow behind me and light them up. Then we can worry about seeing what's behind door number three.”

“We'll all get a surprise attack, right?,” asked Nick.

“Yep,” said Stan. “It will definitely be a surprise when Punch flies into them. I don't have a problem with the rest of you piling on before we have to roll initiative if any of them aren't taken out in the first shot.”

“Then let's do this,” said Nick. “At least with the wiring gone, a lot of the non-broadcast stuff is off the problem list. And the rest is remote control, so there's nothing we can do about that anyway.”

“Let me roll my attack,” said George. “Then the rest is up to you guys.”

Punch leaped into the air and surged around the corridor. The crew brought the gun to bear on him before he could reach them. Energy splashed against his skin as he hit them, barely moving them back from their position.

Jonah hexed the gun. It stopped working for some unknown reason. He smiled at that.

Gadget leaned forward and fired ice into the group. He frowned that he hadn't covered all of the enemy with his attack. And it wasn't enough to encase one of them in a block.

Sighter knocked one of the struggling aliens out of the fight with one blast from his optic mask. He nodded at that.

Shade ran and did a jump kick. That was enough to damage the torso of one of the three aliens still fighting. He staggered back in his armor from the blow.

“Roll initiative,” said Stan. “One guy is down, one is knocked back from the flying kick, two are ready to fight. The gun was jammed so it's out of the fight.”

Everyone rolled their die, and called what they rolled. There was some groaning since the aliens had the high roll, and they would attack first.

“I'm going to knock Punch away on my first attack,” said Stan.

“I attack at the same time,” said George.

“This is why no one likes invulnerability,” said Stan.

“I like it fine,” said George.

One of the aliens punched Punch in the face while he punched. The alien was rocked back, but not knocked out from the blow.

The other alien reached for his personal weapon as he glared at the rest of the team with large eyes.

“Bad move, jack,” said Nick.

“You're last to move, buddy,” said Gail. “It's my turn first.”