Interstice

A forum for in-character roleplay. (IC)
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Kostemetsia
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Name: Kostemetsia

Interstice

Post by Kostemetsia »

OOC: Interstice is a writing exercise to lead up to the arc of Wildcat's World I'll be beginning on April the first. For those I haven't already hit over the head with a link, Wildcat's World is the official Kostemetsiaverse continuity at http://wildcatsworld.350.com/. Anything that happens in the mainstream NSverse needs to be explicitly admitted.

... Do note too that Wildcat's World acknowledges a selection of other fictional universes as semi-canon thanks to Kewen technology, most notably Doctor Who and parts of the Futurama expanded universe, so this is liable to turn into a crossover. It might not, depending on whether I'm in the mood to cross over or not.

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And then he’s gone, rushing down the corridor. At the last moment the lieutenant commander has found something he cares to give his life up for. She stares after him, aghast, one hand outstretched as if almost to grab him by the shoulder and shake some sense into him.

It’s too late. Far too late.

The lieutenant commander is rushing into the slavering jaws of a rogue Kewen. The thing itself is a gigantic bug-like creature, all legs and armoured joints and no visible eyes. No visible armament, for that matter, other than the gunmetal-grey claws that begin at its elbows. It doesn’t need anything else.

The lieutenant commander, for his part, a man not necessarily well-known for his accomplishments before this, is half-tumbling down the corridor with nothing more than a laser and an unarmoured spacesuit. How easily the creature could simply spear him –

But no. Even as she watches it evolves into a nimble series of movements, almost a dance, the young man running circles around his huge, lumbering opponent, firing shots at it. Unfortunately, they seem to bounce off and only enrage it, as far as a member of the Great Swarm can be enraged, and it turns again to engage, inexorably seeking out its prey. In the combat environment of the future – all tactical grids and pre-plotted trajectories – she has to admire such primal yet fluidly graceful bladework.

For that matter, even as she watches the lieutenant commander fighting his losing battle, herself torn between shock and horror, a little part of her mind is analysing the Swarmtrooper’s movements. It looks like a blend of all the gigantic predatory creatures that so frightened the humans of ages gone past; armoured panels virtually cover it, themselves decorated at all angles with lethal spikes.

The fact that it can make any surface of its body into a weapon is perhaps what makes it so frightening; the fact that it has had billennia of training in using its natural weapons is merely a secondary factor in the end.

Eventually, the end has to come. The lieutenant commander backs off, down the pockmarked cylinder of the battlecruiser’s outer-hull starboard corridor, and the Kewen regards him, seemingly almost content to let him stay there. Maybe this will be the end of it; maybe the Swarmtrooper will disengage, disappear, if the lieutenant commander doesn’t provoke it … but it is an undeniable fact that the Kewen do not work like that.

He provokes it. The young man with the short red hair raises his secondary weapon; the weapon that she could have sworn wasn’t there a moment ago. It is a compound grenade launcher, which is –

Compound grenade launchers can break through the hull of a battlecruiser, given the right conditions.

It is with a sense of horrified inevitability that she watches him point it at the ceiling midway between himself and his opponent. One second later, he pulls the trigger, and an impact grenade soars into the roof, instantly blowing out a hole large enough to fit himself, her and their entire engagement team through. What is left of the corridor’s atmosphere rushes out through the breach, sucking the lieutenant commander and the warrior with it.

She lunges at the corridor entry port. Then she hits the forcefield cutting off her team from the pair who were duelling just moments ago; she bounces off rather ungracefully, slamming into the second lieutenant behind her at a few kilometres per hour. Even as she is moving, her gaze is fixed on the ascent of the combatants; the lieutenant commander is tranquil, resigned to his fate, almost martyrlike. The Kewen is not quite so dignified, flailing as it is ripped across the jagged metal strips.

This is where her memory of the fight stops. She can’t remember anything after this in detail, just a maelstrom of blue airlock tubes and gunmetal grey corridors and people who aren’t really people when all is said and done. She can, however, remember what she was thinking: nothing. Just a note, a single note, a wail of loss going on forever and ever …
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God hasn't played dice with the universe since that fateful drunken night when he lost classical mechanics to the devil at craps.[/center]
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