: Log Entry :
: Corp. B. Crowski, Comm Officer :
I'm writing this from the medbay on the evac plane. I can't believe i survived. People say that when you face death your suppose to laugh keep going... i have to assume that these people have never really seen Death.
It was decided that due to time restrictions we would have to take the hallways and stairwells down to the generator room. The demo team trapped down there were holding their own, but they were running low on ammo and the scroggs were starting to close in. The team assigned to help them out consisted of me, 2 heavilly armed soldiers, and one of the rangers. Dragging along all that comm equipment didnt make things any easier, but the demo team said that it would be well worth it if we survived.
The hardest part of that whole trip there was the 1st 15 minutes. The ranger would scout ahead 30 meters or so keeping in continual radio contact with me, then come sprinting back while pairs of rockets went shooting over his shouldiers taking out the guards he was drawing out. Anything the rockets missed my trusty railgun took out clean. I still had some c-15 left on me for some weird reason, so every once and a while i'd throw a timed charge into this room or that. Besides being a great deterent against anything following us, the explosions sounded pretty cool down the winding hallways.
We made it to sublevel 2 in a record 53 minutes, salvaging what ammo we could use from the piles of gore left behind by the rocket explosions. The generator room was located in the SE corner of the floor, a quick jaunt away. We encountered the first signs of resistance in a small maitenence room. There were about 12 of them in there doing various things, the first 4 went down faster then a nun on a catholic priest. The blast from the Rocket Launchers knocked a couple more across the room, and us back out into the hallway. Time for plan B. C-15, 15 seconds, and 25 meters of hallway to clear to get out of the way of the blast. Lucky for me i have this bad hip, the ranger got the job.
He had about 5 meters to go when the slugs exploded his chest. He had to have flown a good 5 meters to put him right in line with our branching hallway.. the blast threw him another 40 and right through a door. We didnt have time to go collect the body, or what was left of it.. we had about 2 hours and 45 minutes to get back to the ammo dump and then another 20 minutes and the evac would be there. We rushed the maitenence room, fully expecting that we woudn't even find a trace of a scrogg body, and were proved correct. The blast had turned the room into a mix of melted metal and partially evaporated plastic and had vaporized the paint right off the walls. Sweet. The generator room was only a couple of hallways away now so we made sure all the clips were full and did the old bulls rush. If they didnt hear us coming then they certainly felt it when rockets and railgun slugs started tearing them to pieces. One of the soldiers took a grazing shot in the ribs from one scrogg who promptly dissapeared as the rocket hit him square in the head. I was running low on grenades trying to cover our retreat path, but was sure i'd find more on one dead body or another.
The situation with the guys in the generator room was getting worse by the moment. The were almost out of ammo, and the scroogs were starting to get brave. There was no sight of heavy weapons fire yet tho, not a single rocket or grenade had been used. They wanted us dead, but they wanted something alive/undamaged even more. One of the soldiers opened the door with a quick rocket and that derw alot of attention our way. Screams went up from all over the generator room and the concentration of lazer and plasma fire that came through that blasted door was mind numbing. We got a quick scream over the comm of 'No Rockets! No Rockets!' and retreated back into an adjoining hallway 20 meters down.
: 'Well what now, if we're limited to small arms fire this is going to take a hell of alot longer then we planned'
> 'Hey, i've been limited to small arms fire the whole time, and i'm doin ok'
: 'Shut up and think. Is there another way into this room?'
} 'Mabye we could distract the scroggs while those 2 make a break for it...'
> 'No, there's something in that room that we need to see. I havent lugged this equipment all the way down here just for fun you know, we have to take them out without destroying the room'
} 'Fuck whatever's in this room, i just want to get those 2 out of here and fucking go home!'
> 'We have our orders. Now think damnit.'
: 'Like i asked before, is there a second way into this room? We could leave someone here to keep their attention and hit them from behind.'
I did a quick check of the base scematic i had downloaded earlier and sure enough, there was a maitenence tube running all the way under the floor with access grates every 20 meters inside the room. The soldiers could pop up on either side of the room and take out alot of scroggs by surprise. There was only one problem, if the main generator was back in action after the emp pulse from the nuke, then the temp in those access tubes would be close to 180 degrees celcius, hot enough to fry the soldiers even through their armor.
: --'Hey demo team, can you tell if the main reactor is on?'
> --'There is no main reactor. Only that thing.'
: --'Thing? What thing?'
> --'The... THING! It takes up the whole room. The reactor is gone.'
: --'WHAT? Why the fuck didn't you tell us that before?!?'
> --'Uh.... you didnt ask? I dont know! We're just a little too preoccupied here to take notice of those little things.'
: --'Grrr.. Ok, we have a plan then. Hold tight and we'll be in there asap.'
Little things my ass, a missing reactor is a blatantly obvious big thing if you ask me. I would have left them there to rot after that conversation if it had been an option.
The soldiers took off to the tube access rooms and i was left to show off my camping skills to nobody but the scroggs who started to pile up in front of the door. Less then 10 minutes later there was a flurry of gun fire from inside the room and things got really really quiet.
: *phzzzt*--'Thats all of them, but Jonsons been hit *pzzzzt*y bad, the medic is taking a look at him now so get your ass *phzzzt*ere and get to work. You have to see this man' *pzzzt*
It took a couple of minutes to clear the pile of bodies in front of the door. As i entered the room my jaw dropped to my chest and my nuts shriveled up to the size of bb's. Sitting in the middle of the room was.. well.. a large ring generating this weird blue feild. It had to be a good 10 meters high and almost 3 meters thick.. and the power it was giving off was wreaking havoc with my equipment. I turned the camera on and did a full 360 of the thing. There were cables and pipes running off of it in all directions, but they looked like they weren't part of the design. The archetecture of the thing was completly alien to me too, if a human mind designed this thing then it was either blind or completly insane. I got pretty close to the blue feild, but stopped short of being a total idiot and touching the thing. It looked crystaline and yet watery at the same time, and was just short of being opaque.
: 'They coudn't have built this thing, look at the scrapes on floor, it was moved here, and recently. There has to be something around here that tells us what the fuck this thing is.'
> 'Well we lost Jonson so i guess there's no real hurry to get back now. We've got about a half an hour before we have to head back. Start looking.'
: 'See if you can find any computer consoles or something. These cables have to lead somewhere. Goddamnit this thing scares the shit out of me.'
> 'Got it, what do you think it is?'
: 'Fucked if i know, probably some kind of portal or gate, mabye its just a big trash compactor.'
We searched the room and came across a set of computer terminals in an adjoining room.
: 'According to this, its something called a 'Time Flux Generator'. It creates a feild of unstable space/time.'
> 'And in english?'
: 'I guess its a time machine and a VLD Teleporter at the same time.'
> 'I said english'
: 'Goddamit! I dont have time to give you a lesson in teleporter theory right now! But to sum it up, you know what a time machine is, and that to us its theoretically impossible. Scientists tried, but the jumps always created so much paradox, even sending just an inanimate object, that the project was abandoned. As for teleporters, normal teleporter technology was developed with matter to energy conversion. But the range was so limited and the data corruption so bad during conversion that that was summarilly abandoned too. And VLD teleporters, or Very Long Distance, that never even got out of the theory stage. There was one popular theory that said if you bent space, you could simply connect 2 points, make a hole, and walk through. There were other theories, but they were just to weird to get into. But anyways, thats probably what this thing does, except it bends both space and time.'
> 'Though we didnt have time for a theory lesson, so what?'
: 'SO WHAT?!? THIS THING IS MORE FUCKING IMPORTANT THEN THE PRESIDENT!.. no fuck that, more important than anything on this shit ball of a world. We could go back and stop the war from happening!'
> 'Um, woudn't we be out of a job then?'
: 'God, you soldiers are such fucking morons.'
Give a janitor a rocket launcher and what do ya get?? Yup, a soldier.
I had to get out of the room to contact the admiral, the interferance from the Flux machine was really messing with my equipment. I tried to explain it to him basically the same as i explained it to the soldier and got basically the same responce. After re-explaining it to the engineers, in a much shorter version since they knew the theory already, they explained it to the admiral in such a way as to make its imporatace painfully obvious. I was told to haul the communication equipment back to the ammo dump and to bring the medic with me. The soldier and demoman were ordered to stay and secure the machine, and to kill any remaining scroggs on that level. Before we left i gave the soldier some pretty simple instructions.
: 'Dont. Touch. Anything!'
> 'Dont get fucking condesending on me. Get out of here'
Hmmm, must be one of those 'Sanitary Engineers' i keep hearing about.
I finished downloading the computers memory into my comm pack and we headed back to the ammo room. Resistance was light and very unorganized on the way back, but i didnt expect it to say that way. We met a group of 3 scroggs heading up the stairs. I put a slug through the groin of one and the medic chewed another one up with his MR12 (a one handed mini gattlin that launches a nail similar to the railgun's depleted uranuim slug, sweet little weapon if you can get one). The other one must have been grazed by the slug that passed through the scrogg i hit because he hesitated just a moment too long. I opened up 2 nice little holes in his chest and the medic removed everything from the thighs down. We stumbled over the bodies and continued our assent. We met a similar group of guards just outside the stairwell on the main floor and took care of them just as easilly. By this time i could just barely stagger along on my wounded hip and was starting to see weird spots.
: 'Um, sure you dont want any painkillers for that? i have some locals that'll do alot more good then the constant adrenaline shots.'
> 'All i want is a big fucking joint right now.'
: 'Um, mabye i can scrounge up some of those THC pills later if your still so inclined.'
> 'Nah, i can wait till i'm somewhere public where i can make a proper ass of myself'
: 'Heh, sounds like a plan. At least let me carry that equipment for ya.'
> 'No time to properly disconnect the neural link, and i dont really feel like ripping it out of my head. I'll be fine'
Ya, big tough me. Probably never see combat again if this isnt taken care of properly real soon. Replacement hips are a dime a dozen, and worth just about as much to someone like me.
We made it back to the ammo dump and got in contact with the evac team. They were about 10 minutes away, actually fucking ahead of scedule, and needed to know our status. The admiral explained what was going on and they insisted we get in contact with A22. The admiral contacted A22 and the engineers explained the situation more thorally then either I or the admiral could have. We were then given a new set of orders. The president, prisoners and any wounded would get on the evac and the rest would stay to try and wipe out the remaining scrogg. Another team would be sent out within minutes and would arive in under 3 hours to assist in the operation. Under no circumstances was the Flux generator to be harmed or even touched, and the floor that it was contained on was to be wiped clean and sealed off awaiting the arival of a 'cleaner' team. Cleaner teams usually ment a really unpleasent debriefing and a time or two even dissapearences. I'm glad i got on this plane. The admiral dispatched the engineers to go over the generator, to make sure it wasn't a threat to the evac team or reinforcements.
By this time i coudn't walk anymore. My hip had ceased up and no matter what the medic did he coudn't get rid of the burning pain. When the evac arrived i had to carried out to the plane. How embarrising. We're headed for DC4 now and a proper medical facility.
Wow, there must be a god. The president just pulled a case out of whats left of his suit and sparked up the fattest joint i've ever seen. I think this is going to be a great flight.