+Formal Habitat Block V+
+Plant Site Octa-Bx/A - Industri-Fabricate Sector 69+
Option Circuitry Profusion
Her name was Jader Voque.
She was near human, wore iridescent patches of scaled flesh behind her ripped ears, beneath an immaculately designed crop of white-on-snow hair shaved to a subtle cap riding the orbital of her skull, with a long face tapering into a small mouth overbit by miniscule fang-points. Her nose was a slanted line as sharp as a blade. What her coworkers found most unnerving where her mismatched eyes, deformed ovals perforating into the surrounding iris-flesh that were gold and platinum. Like that, did they? A product of some back-quarter market gene-modding. Just a tad illegal, but the results bought delivered sterling individualism and a clarity of character that most lacked on a greyed out world like Etti IV.
She was close to forty. Discrete rejuvenation regimes gave her back twenty years, made her a darling beside her three daughters. Jader Voque also worked the 16:00 to 00:00 supervisory shift at Khrossing Energy's combined cycle plant Octa-Bx/A, one of the most senior members with almost seventeen years of in-hand expertise. She had close to a hundred individual technical and safety tickets ranging from Material Safety Data Slates to Enclosed Workplace Hazardous Designations and a Level 4 first aid responder qualification. She dared anyone on-site to produce more comprehensive secondary training stubs than she. In six years, tentative estimate, she'd qualify for retirement benefits and planned to permanently clock out for a long restorative at her family lodge, a secluded fan-house architecture, on Spira.
Jader Voque had to firstly survive today. It wasn't going well. Four days ago during mid-shift, fifteen at-console technicians rapidly filtered out of reality. Never mind the logistical strain of running a full combi-cycle plant at half staff, or the ineffective attentions by local precincts likewise raked taut to the limit, the plant was spooked. And then today, commlink channels to the front managerial offices went dead. Someone cried out they saw bursts of fire imploding in the parking grid. Then channels went live in horro-static blurts of growling carbine-fire, office staff crying out, before they audibly burst into patterns of cooked skin and blood.
Techies ran for the auto-doors, slamming emergency cut-off dead switches to cycle in armoured paneling and rebuff-gates into place. Stop-gap measures until they could effect escape from... whomever it was that had come to shoot the plant to pieces. Supervisor Voque was halfway across Turbine Hall A-2 when she first heard the gates fail. Air sucked out of her ears and then poked back into her eyes, as melting detonations ate through the duralloys and surrounding ferrocrete and rebar. Figures shot through the smoke. Voque watched a woman at a floor terminal die when struck by a bolt, immolated from within and blowing her skeleton out her flesh. Carder Gholesh, an old hand at the power-boiler, fell over with his head missing, his neck a crisp stump of seared meat. Next was 'Newboy.'
He was twenty three, out of collegiate training, freshly hired three months prior, and just now weaned off probation. Voque thought he was handsome. He made little mention of a significant other. Before the week was out, she'd ask him if he liked an evening out for drinks. A mesh-armoured manling, appearing like a wedge of alabastor plate on the overseer gantry, with a darkly snouted auto-rifle, shot at them. Orbs of lilac light snapped past them. They started to run.
The gunner thumbed off their burst-limiter. A full-bore hail of smashing, energy encased slug rounds rained after them. Voque didn't see the first hole that plugged into Newboy's lumbar. But turning a moment, she looked in time to see a low shelf of bullets cut off his legs at the knees. Screaming, Newboy went down.
Blood previously in his face was draining out through the blistered wreckage that counted for his knee-caps. Newboy half regarded his crippled state, poking at where his coveralls had fused to his thighs. A hand ran over his brow, and Jader Voque trembled herself. His sweat was just gelatin. Newboy was turning over to just a sheet spare of being snow painted, shock dulling out his faculties. Supervisor Voque looked up to see the gunner hurrying on, turning out their emptied magazine for a fresh tube from a webbed waist-belt. She bent down, took Newboy by either armpit, and began running backwards along the gantry as fast as crying panic, adrenaline, and slowly deadening weight would allow.
...Both heard that ominous, mechanical crack. Voque looked up over Newboy's blood flecked hair. The gunner had rammed the magazine tube home and caught the rifle's priming slide back, chambering a fresh slug-roung. He raised the stock-butt into his shoulder crook. She blinked away the targeting sight dotting across her face. Jader Voque thought of her three precious daughters. The gunner opened up and raked her vision with spitting muzzle-fire, and Newboy began laughing in the face of demise.
Wind shrieked over her helmet and brow. Quite suddenly, a shape had inter-spliced itself between the gunman and them. Voque only saw a black frame shimmering with daemon-speed, a sword clenched in hand, snapping it forth like liquid-lightning that bit through and thwarted the cone of spraying, caseless rounds. It bulled into the gunman, and slew him. 'Slew' was a poor noun. Voque watched her would-be murderer fall, sheeting blood out a single, heavy wound opening him out from throat to liver.
"What the hell - - ?" Newboy mumbled.
The shape leapt from the turbine gantry to the hall floor. Sixteen other raiders, all tall colossi in face-less alabastor casement, addressed the threat with their hell-guns. Fleeing techies, most nursing smouldering flesh-wounds inflicted by grazing las-fires, stopped and watched.
They fired and missed. Auto-fire punched through console and turbine casing without distinction, blowing them out, slagging work fluid into acrid steam, crippling primary shafts, initiating petaled explosions that ran up the plated walling. The daemon-thing ducked, spun, side-stepped out of lancing firing vectors, struck, deflecting slug-rounds with curt ripostes that
plinked deformed bolts off the whirring sword. Combat was like an after-image. It wove in close, ripped three apart with as many blows, turned and launched across the bay. It took meters in a step, smashing aside gun fire, following in with its blade that bit through duraplast and weavemesh like wet particle board. One tried to blast its now turned backside. Somehow, impossibly, it read the intention, turned on heel, leg, and hip, and shot an arm out.
Voque didn't quite see the sheathe-knife make its flight, but the mercenary juddered. His face-plate, modeled after an axe-head, was cracked like a stuck egg, a brass-pommeled hilt punched in where his teeth would be. Even before his stumbling corpse toppled forward off its knees, the killer was rebounding. Shots smote flak-craters into floor, wall, ceiling, desperate aims trying to track its flight. Another died, skewered through breast-plate and heart. His squad-companion turned and blitzed his remains into mist with concentrated carbine-fire. The snug, modular gun in his gloved hands cycled onto dry fire, magazine spent. His hand, reaching for the next feed-tube, went for a spin off at the wrist. A clean, slanted hack took him through the back of his gorget armour and freed his head.
Individual puddles of arterial-bright gore were linking together in splattered formation. Combat gore showed in severed distal limbs and bifurcated torsos, shards of broke armour-casing spinning in place where the floor wasn't stitched open and pitted by errant shooting. The shape approached one remaining gunner; they wore lieutenant pips mag-locked to their elegant cuirass, dangling campaign-tassels denoting successful, nameless operations. Fire opened up, drenching the killer-thing in las-bolts. Up came that blade fast, so _damn_ fast, deflecting them aside. It hardly seemed to move; the wrists, elbows, shoulders just turned or cocked just so, minimizing expenditure of energy, utilizing core musculature. The lieutenant threw down the rifle and went to snatch their pistol free.
It was a snub-model chased in reflective chrome and gilted with a spiral gold finial for a nose-sight. That daemon-thigh flicked the blade tip over and across. The officer watched the slide gently wobble free off the pistol frame and clatter between his boots. He looked up into a pale face framed by hair sucked so dead of colour, it hung white over his brow.
"What-what are you doing...?"
Seydon put Razorlight away to its scabbard, stepped in, and shunted the pivot-blade home up into the lieutenant's visor plate. "Killing monsters."
