Stars Above The Willow Tree

Chapter 42 Human Diplomacy

Willow slowly blew out a breath and waited for the signal.

"Easy. Hold..." Derek said over the comm.

He was clad in his massive mech and she crouched on his shoulder, holding onto his helmet. Well, it wasn't actually a helmet as she was sure his head wasn't in there. She didn't actually know what purpose it served. For now, it was her hand-hold, mag boots anchoring her in place. Behind them, a third of Team Rocket floated while another third were secured to what would be the floor if the ship were under thrust. The rest were on the relative ceiling.

Consisting of humans, Tilith, and Koli, Team Rocket was as formidable as the rest of the teams who'd been training together for the ambush. But that hadn't saved Teams Cinnamon Roll, and Beans n' Rice.

The lights in the hangar were blinking erratically and smoke filled the air. It otherwise looked exactly as she remembered it and no matter how many times she did this, it always unsettled her.

Casey vibrated over her skin, excited and ready for the hunt, or the fight. Though she didn't have eyes in the back of her head, she knew exactly where every one of her team members were in relation to herself. Somehow, Casey could sense their heat and were the battlesuit not partially hidden by the vac suit she wore, she might have been able to actually see them, in a way. She didn't know how Casey planted that information into her brain and she didn't care anymore, if she were being honest. Of course, her team members were all marked on her HUD but at the moment, they were all just a bunch of blue chevrons that her fellow team members called carrots that were grouped off to the sides of her vision. If she turned her head, they separated  and hovered over her people. It had been incredibly distracting at first, but she was used to it now.

"Advance," Derek said.

Her team flowed forward, leapfrogging silently between crates and large pieces of equipment, their creeping gait graceful and predatory despite their mag boots. The floaters—she still couldn't believe they were okay with being called that—were silent and graceful, propelling themselves forward with little jets of air from tiny nozzles in their gloves and boots.

As Derek advanced his massive mech, his footsteps thunked heavily and hissed as the magnetic locks engaged and released. The mech's movement otherwise carried the eerie sound of knives softly caressing knives.

They hoped to present a conundrum. The Ssketch were  basically lobotomized into sociopathic tendencies so a team of psychologists had determined it likely that in the moment they may rely on logic and what they know of the human mind.
So, as she and Derick presented a perfect and formidable target, the idea was that they would be ignored by some of the Ssketch as a possible misdirection.

They would be both wrong, and right.

A door on the opposite side of the hanger hissed open.

"Contact," Blue's chipper voice sounded over the comm.

"I count three left," said Delano, the youngest member of the team at only seventeen years.

"No. Four left, four right," Jencheo corrected just as two "Ssketch" ran through the doors and split off, laying down cover fire.

They didn't know much of Ssketch weaponry aside from the battlesuits but both Tilith and Ssketch had described their projectile weapons in enough detail to know they were similar to human guns.

No one fired back. Instead, Blue released a swarm of micro drones that shot through the open door and harassed the Ssketch out in the hall, firing clusters of squibs that went off like rapid fire, distracting them from the speaker drones that zipped in and immediately started blaring four different hardcore songs while constantly changing course and strobing with blinding flashes.