[Fiction] Damaged Goods, Part 2^e

Soundtrack.

There was a great cracking sound as Snow ran down the corridor.  A sort of terrible rending sound, like thunder but an octave lower. Snow had never heard anything so deep, nor so frightening.  Quite soon after that the artificial gravity failed, and Snow lost his grip, his last step propelling him into the ceiling.  Dead bodies floated everywhere.  Snow grabbed and threw them, propelling him down the lane.  He reached the doors to the vestral hanger but they were sealed.  The hanger was losing air.  Cursing, Snow pulled out his phone and connected to the ships central computer.

Hull Status:  Catastrophic Failure
* *  all blast doors shut * *
Engine 1:  Offline
Engine 2:  Offline
Engine 3:  Offline
Engine 4:  Offline
Engine 5:  Offline
Reactor 1:  Offline
Reactor 2: * * Critical * *
Reactor 3:  Offline
Thruster Propellant: 0%
Batteries:  1%
Location:  LEO
Orbital Inclination: unknown
Network:  No connection

And then a list of missing crew lifesigns that went on for pages.  Nearly everyone was dead.  And if they weren't...well they were going to be.  Blast doors didn't have very convenient controls, and Snow had less than a minute.  Little did the hanger's blast doors know, air was being lost all over the ship.  Snow could already see fuzzy edges on his vision.  Snow connected to one of the engineering computers and wrote a virus that tricked the computers into thinking that everything was normal.  Every blast door opened.  On the entire ship.

If Snow had a God's eye view of the starship, he would have seen hundreds of people dying.  But he didn't.  So that's nice.

The way was clear, but the last mobile suit was on the other end of the hangar.  Snow launched himself from a railing, but the mobile suit was 200 meters away and it was going to be close.

And then the reactor exploded.  A concussive wave pushed him off course shortly before plasma fire (well, really its just plasma) erupted into the hangar.  A jet of the superheated material narrowly missed taking Snow's leg off, although it did set his pants on fire.  More importantly, though, is that the shockwave had knocked him off course.  He was going to miss the mobile suit by a meter.

Snow pulled his phone out again and with shaking fingers, and seconds to spare, sent a command to the mobile suit to open the cockpit, just before the entire network went dark.

A panel in the mobile suit's chest flew open, just in time and just far enough for Snow to grab it and propel himself into the cockpit of the mobile suit.  He pulled the door shut just before plasma fully engulfed the mobile suit--plasma that would eat through the suit's armor in seconds.  Snow quickstarted the mobile suite and punched the throttle, which was quite difficult because he was currently upside down the cockpit.

The mobile suit shot across the hangar and slammed into a wall.  Snow's body was flung into the windows.  His leg was on fire.  Smoke filled the cabin.  And his head hurt like hell.  But he would not give up.  He found the gun controls and activated the gatlings inside the hangar.  They quickly tore a number of holes in different places.  Right about the time he ran out of ammo, he saw a hole large enough for the mobile suit to grab onto and pull itself out of the dying ship, where it was directly knocked off by the force of the atmosphere the great hulk was descending into.

Pieces all around with glowed with the long streaks of fire of objects entering atmo.

Snow righted himself, strapped into the chair and put out his leg.  He grabbed the controls and assessed the screen.  The suit was nearly out of main power; in fact, its lack of charge was the reason it was left out of the fight.  Chemical thrusters were out of propellant and ion thrusters were useless in or around an atmosphere.  Also the armor was mostly gone.  He couldn't maintain orbit and he couldn't make the descent without burning up.

But the starship was being torn apart all around him.  Snow used what power he had left to find a piece of the hanger.  The mobile suite held the shrapnel in front of him using its arms, and he used the legs to maintain the balance with the shrapnel in front of him to absorb the heat from the compressed air.  It wasn't a perfect solution.  The mobile suit's hands would no doubt burn off.  But it was enough to reduce velocity to switch to flight mode.  Well, it would have been.

Something terrible jerked the gundam backwards, shearing and tearing his leg off.  The hangar shrapnel flew out of the mobile suit's hands, and the mobile suit began a roll.  As it did so, Snow caught sight of the tail of the dragon.

The mobile suits roll continued, an awkward spin that brought the mobile suit around just in time to see the dragon coming for him, mouth agape, flames just beginning to leap out.  Snow pushed all of his remaining power to the mobile suit's right side, whipped the gundam cannon out of its holster, and fired down the dragon's throat.

The blast knocked the two of them apart.

They were in the stratosphere.

Main power was gone.

There was a tenth of a percent of power left in the battery.  Normal flight all the way down to the surface would take at least 7%.  Snow Monkey put the mobile suit in a dive.  It took about three seconds to exceed the max airspeed, and only five before pieces started flying off.  The turbulence was intense, and by 10,000 feet it make the suit shake in a very distressing standing wave.

Snow Monkey started easing up on the pitch, slowly, slowly, wincing every time he heard a loud bang and felt the altered airflow.  He descended through 5,000 and then 4,000 feet still at a very steep angle, though he had nearly reached a respectable 50 degrees by 3,000.  Then he pulled up with everything he had, flaring the landing so that by 500 feet he was slowing to a safe speed, perhaps just in time to drop into a football field that just happened to be in his line of descent.  Success was mere seconds away.  And then something both mechanical and very, very important, snapped.

The mobile suit flipped, tumbled, and landed on its back against a skyscraper, like a toy solder being tossed against the wall.  The suit slid down to the ground, various pieces on its back digging into and pulling on the windows of the building as it fell.

Snow Monkey leaned back and closed his eyes.  He had won.  He'd fucking won, man.  He blasted that sucker in the throat with an explosive slug the side of a small european car.  Well maybe not that big but it was pretty...damn....

Snow drifted off.

He came too with the sound of a woman's scream.  Blinking, Snow looked in front of him, outside the cockpit.  The dragon landed.  The dragon!  It was wounded, sure.  Its wings were all fucked and its tail looked somewhat shorter than it did previously and it's metal skin was way less shiny.  And it had a black eye.  And a hole in its throat.  But it also looked super pissed off.

Snow glanced at the panel.  He had like...nothing.  There was a slug in the cannon but he was out of power.  The main battery was at 0%.  Pretty much everything on the screen was blinking red.  The left leg was actually physically gone, which I'll have you know is about as impressive as that guy who landed the F-15 with a wing missing.  Snow grabbed for his side arm but felt an empty pouch, which evoked a distant memory of using the gun to help propel himself during a lack of gravity, and/or executing a superior officer.  Did he do that?  He couldn't remember.  It was extremely difficult to think, and his head hurt like fucking hell.  And his vision was blurry.  Blood?  And his leg.  His fucking leg.

The woman screamed again.  Or maybe it was crying.

Snow cleared the command console down to a command prompt and looked at nearly everything.  The battery may have been dead, but the control console and the remaining leg still had residual charges in their capacitors.  If he could get the right...

Snow made the computer do a very simple-looking yet brain hurting calculus equation.  Then he sent the results to the mobile suit's right leg.

With one pseudo-burst of movement, the right leg moved, neither slow, nor fast, pushing the otherwise dead arm into exactly the right position, with the huge gun barrel aiming straight across to the dragon.

"Got you," whispered Snow.

And this is where Snow wakes up.  Except: he was already awake.

Snow winced and blinked blood out of his right eye.  The left was swollen shut.  His right arm was weak, balanced precariously on his knee.  Even worse, he had a very scary notion that mobile suits did not actually exist in real life.

In front of him, Nikka was on her knees.  Mascara ran down her face in tear lines.  Her holster was empty, her dress torn, with one breast popped out.  The cop was behind her, holding both of her arms behind her with one arm, a position which thrust her chest out to a striking degree.  The other arm...

Nikka had her head turned, she was avoiding...

The man from the NSA was in front of her, jeans down, cock out.  His erection bounced with every heartbeat, and his heartbeats were quick.  He must have been new to fieldwork.  The cop grabbed Nikka's hair with his free arm and forced her head to turn toward the NSA agent's cock.  She resisted, but, inch by inch, her mouth passed closer and closer to the tip.  And then she closed her eyes.

Perfect.

Snow's first shot went home, right at the base of the guys dick, which exploded in a cloud of blood, painting Nikka's face like some kind of horror movie facial.  Which is why its so fortunate that she closed her eyes.  Snow took his time recovering from the recoil, then swung the gun left.  Previously he had a good visual line down the sights of the gun, but now he was firing blind, and he didn't want to hit Nikka.  He fired again, and the shot was wide.  Super fucking wide.  The recoil pushed the gun off target.  Snow recovered and missed again.  He recovered from the recoil again, but the cop was recovering his wits faster.  The cop pulled on Nikka, turning her to use her as a shield.  Snow moved the gun up and hit him in the neck.

The cop dropped Nikka and grabbed his throat with both hands.  Nikka scrambled away in a mad crawl that was somewhat bumbling because a surge of adrenaline made it difficult to control her limbs effectively.

Blood squirted out from between the cop's fingers.  The NSA agent bled out through his dick and collapsed.

Snow recovered from the recoil.  He wanted to shoot the cop in the dick too.  He knew the man had an erection.  He...just...couldnt...find...it.  Snow's eyes searched for a bulge somewhere in the fading black mass that was the man's pants, right up until he passed out, the gun falling from his hand.

Unfortunately for Nikka and unbeknownst to Snow, with his limited field of vision, the impending threesome was actually going to be a four man gang bang culminating not only in cumshots of justice but in a summary execution that would be later ruled as a suicide.  In fact, it was Detective Ramsey who actually had first dibs on Nikka's pussy.  And it was Detective Ramsey, the previously unknown, shotgun wielding law enforcement officer, who rounded the corner when he heard Snow's gun drop.

Nikka saw him, screamed, and curled up in a ball.  Ramsey's attention drifted to Snow.

"FUCK YOU, YOU PIECE OF SHIT," he screamed, white hot rage in his eyes and spittle flying from his mouth.  "You better not fucking die on me shitbag.  I'm gonna burn you alive and I'm gonna skull fuck that bitch over your burned-"  The detective's white knuckled grip accidentally set the shotgun off, pushing a deer slug into the ceiling.

Which...well I don't know how to introduce this, but this is when the (a?) baseball bat crushed Ramsey's skull.  Obviously a tire iron would have been more thematic for this new character, but this being an emergency, the gents had to grab the nearest objects in the trunks, being that they did not have guns on them.  Yes, gents.  Two of them, now.

The wielder of the bat was a moderately attractive, highly tattooed muscular type who would not look out of place in a shitty Nickelback music video.  He moved more like a cat, though, and had absolutely no room in his brain for style or theatrics.  By the time Ramsey's head hit the ground it had actually been bashed with the bat twice more, and in about a second the man had leaned down and snapped the detective's neck, a more or less automatic move to ensure the enemy was dead.  The cop and NSA agent received their own proverbial double-taps shortely thereafter.

"Holy shit, Biff," said the man behind him.  "Remind me never to piss you off."

"Get Nikka," growled Biff.

The other man--well I can't think of a cool way to introduce him so I'll just tell you he's Jason (I know, not really a cool name anyway.  In fact he's not really a cool character; he's just Jason.  In fact that his his allterative superhero name:  Just Jason) -- he rushed over to Nikka and scooped her into his arms.

Biff examined Snow's body, and, with the worried eye of a complete amateur ignorant of basic first aid, pronounced him ready for transport and hooked him in a fireman's carry.

Obviously Biff exited the building carrying Snow and Jason carrying Nikka.  It was very poetic.  The only way it could have been more poetic was if the building was on fire also.  But it wasnt.  Picture the building on fire though; just imagine it.  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

A short time later, Biff's black muscle car, with Nikka and Snow, followed by Jason's prius, screeched around the last bend in the road and shot onto the bridge to Coder's Island, a sort of long cobblestoned causeway lined with stone gargoyles on each side.  Ak-wielding women clad in corsets and combat boots stood guard at the entrance to the island, allowing the cars to pass.

The ninjas were safe.