- Invitation Status
- Posting Speed
- 1-3 posts per week
- One post per week
- Online Availability
- Weekends, I tend to have buckets of time unless I'm working or traveling (I'll let you know), then I'm scarce af. During the week, I work pretty standard 9-5, then go to class or the gym, so....8-11 PM Pacific?
- Writing Levels
- Adept
- Advanced
- Douche
- Preferred Character Gender
- Primarily Prefer Female
- Genres
- I'm open to more than I'm closed to. If it doesn't fall under gratuitous or inorganic (forced) romance, pitch me an idea, and we'll work it out.
"This is Horus to Strike Team: Roanoke, Horus to Strike: Roanoke. You guys still picking us up down there?"
Hovering just in front of her nose, Margot's new, yet comfortingly familiar HUD sparked to life in bubblegum pink.
"That's a negative, Chewie," she said brightly. Even speaking normally, her voice seemed to fill the small compartment of the shuttle, though the three other people there with her would have been more than used to it by now. At just five feet tall, Margot was the smallest of their already small team, and fully believed she had both the lung capacity, and the life calling to make up for it.
"Coms systems have crashed since the last time you checked in five minutes ago." She knew full well Ethan Choi, coms support back on the Horus some 500 kilometers overhead, was checking their individual systems for a final time before they went planetside, and would check again once they were all settled with their mechs. But after almost two and a half years of prep and training, Argus's first intersterllar strike team, cheekily named Roanoke just a few months prior when they'd gotten their first real mission in the new star system, was finally about to touchdown at New Jamestown, and Margot Diaz was excited. And nervous. But mostly excited.
"Sorry, what was that?" Ethan's voice was in her ear a second later, drawing her eyes from the blur of verdant green she could only just see out the shuttle window. "You wanted Tango's life support systems remotely shut down?"
"Intentalo, culo," Margot quipped in her native Spanish. "See if you get any mystery science rocks when we get back."
"If you get back."
"Alright, enough." Captain's voice was sharp, if not entirely unamused, in her headset, and Margot felt her spine straighten automatically, an annoying habit she blamed on too much time spent with her copilot under Tango's sims for the last 18 months.
"Diaz, your HUD's a go. Everyone else, buzz back to Ensign Choi. Without the chatter, please? Let's try and remember where we are and why. No more sims out here, kids, this here's the real deal. For starters, remember New Jamestown average gravity stands at 130% of Earth. Which means if you guys fall, you are fall hard. Be careful out there, and let's try and keep Doc here half sane, alright?
"Now. I want to run down the plan with you all one more time before you come up on your DZ. I've got you guys clocked at touchdown in...t-minus twelve minutes. Climate report says you guys are looking at pretty mild days, but humidity is way up, almost 90% -- " Margot groaned and raked a hand through her jet curls, just barely tucked under a neon green bandana. The Captain continued pointedly, " -- so be watch yourselves, especially in the afternoons. Nights are expected to drop below freezing, too. Make sure you're either back at camp or locked down by dusk. All three mechs are outfitted with survival rations enough for ten people to last two weeks under optimal conditions. But let's not test that, deal?
"DZ is about a three day mech-march from the colony, used to operate as a drop center for new supply shipments when the colony was first settled four years back, but we got it up and running for you guys to use as a base as needed. If we lose touch with you for whatever reason, we'll have a transport back up here to the Horus within twelve hours of lost contact, understood?"
He waited for an answer while Go fiddled idly with the pistol on her belt, half-assedly reviewing what she could remember of her mission dossier. Which was little more than the winking the Argus logo from the digital file, the same one stitched into the her jumpsuit above her thigh. She'd always thought it looked creepy if you didn't know what you were looking at. But then maybe that was the point.
Just across from her, David -- or Oak, as he went by now, thanks, of course, to Margot -- was running through his own files on his HUD. It consisted mostly of the team's vitals, all just shy of normal after having woken two weeks ago from six months of cryosleep. He set himself a quick reminder to key up scanners for Lady and Tango both first thing tomorrow.
"...officially, we lost contact with New Jamestown about eight months ago, though transmissions were...garbled about six months prior to say the least," the Captain continued blithely. "Apparently, the story is the Somnambulist started receiving strange messages in place of weekly check-ins, and then one day, all outgoing communications ceased. No one's been able to pick up anything, not even radio signals, from the colony since. Investors hired Argus to find out what happened, and just what happened. This is recon and nothing else. I want to make that very clear. Are we understood?"
"Yes, sir," David snapped. "You should start receiving reports by EOD tomorrow."
Go, for her part, only nodded distractedly as she craned her neck to look out the small panel of glass at the side of their shuttle. The ground was getting closer and the butterflies in her stomach were starting to feel more like excited pterodactyls. She could just barely make out the top of a lone radio tower standing almost impossibly lean over the myriad dwarfed trees that covered most of the planet's surface.
Grinning, she kicked the woman sitting diagonal from her and nodded out the window, green eyes wide.
"Oye, Sparky. Race you there?"
--
Intentalo, culo - try it, asshole
Oye - hey
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