Old Frontiers: The Severan Contingency

Chapter 2, Part 3

The situation devolved rapidly. Firefights on the concourse weren't a common occurrence and naturally, the local forces were inept at being able to respond to coordinated violence. There were a few discharges of weapons on the upper and lower tiers of Port City, but very rarely did anyone gather a small group to shoot up anything. If anything could mobilize the local forces it was a destabilizing event that could hurt their pay.

Macross ran towards the fighting as others fled. The drones that were innocently floating around above and below gave her a perspective that everyone else lacked. There was an exchange of fire between two buildings and she could see which one held the target of her investigation. The heat sensor of the structure saw the woman's signature as a giant blob that engulfed nearly the entirety of the structure.

"I need a position with a vantage against the gunners." Macross looked across the nearby structures and saw that the bridge above her was lit up. Too public, but perhaps everyone in the area who could flee already had.

She studied the pillar that the bridge was connected too and then hurried over to it, jumping down to the rooftops of shops below the concourse. Macross dashed across these with trained dexterity and leaped towards the pillar. She clawed her way up the side, noting the marks in the pillar where others like her had already tried scaling the pillar at one time. The whole process took about thirty seconds and even her training left her muscles burning from the sudden exertion.

"Weapon," she said and a drone came down dropping off a compacted rifle.

She manually pulled it out and sighted the scope to ensure everything was working properly. With these Macross could look straight in at the hostiles. They were Keloi, poorly dressed, but well equipped with illegal hull-breaching weapons. From the looks of things, they weren't half bad at shooting either.

The heat sensors exploded in her visor. The Kith hesitated a moment. "Frek." She turned and ran across to the other side, jumping off the other side as the bridge exploded upwards in a spray of molten liquid.

--

"Why did you attack Rather?" Quinton demanded. He crouched low as the walls exploded from breaching rounds on every side.

"I didn't go there to fight. He got in the way. I let him down easy."

"Looked beat up to me."

"If I wanted to hurt him, little Kith, he would be in pieces," the thief said.

"Better time to discuss this? Later," Prinz said. He rose and fired several rounds of his Fastar. The whump-whump sound reverberated inside of their rapidly crumbling structure.

"Then why were you on our ship?" Quinton looked over for a moment and saw everyone gathered on the second floor of the fiber shop. They were clustered too closely together and as he leaned back down he considered the Dark Rounds.

They weren't technically legal, but this deep into the station they probably wouldn't cause too much structural damage. If anyone else was in the building with the gunmen, however, they would be killed pretty much instantly.

"Prinz, I need something," he said.

Kimmy crept forward and handed him a revolver. He took it gingerly at first and then gripped the big weapon properly. His Castar-twin would allow him to fare better than the other Obsolus because he could take the recoil of the human weapon. "That way out," the Atar said.

"I know how to fire a weapon," he replied with a slight growl.

"I needed a part little Kith. Those people over there—they have a friend of mine," she replied. The thief poked her energy pistol out of the window and burned terrible scorch marks in the walls of the opposing makeshift-fortress.