A L () E N With Mad King Ruprecht the Fish.
Created | Updated Sep 14, 2002
Space, 2136.
I had led a crack team of professional Colonial Marines to the surface of Planet LV426 in order to re-establish the unaccountably comprimised communications uplink with the settlers of a multi million dollar terraforming facility and eradicate any signs of suspected xenomorphic infiltration.
Of course, courtesy of an incredulous extravaganza of misfortunate events I had almost immediately found myself reduced to a mere handful of demoralised marines and an extremely irritating young girl who's sickly twee manner could yet prove an invaluable weapon in it's own right.
Within an hour of dropship dust-off the majority of my platoon had been maimed, mangled, disembowelled, liquified by acid or carried away screaming for purposes best left to the imagination. The misbegotten alien menace were well known to be vicious, murderous automatons; unthinking, unstoppable and totally dedicated to the extermination of any other species. Today, however, they had been far less sophisticated and our operation had suffered an irrepairable crimp as a result.
Soon after, our APC; containing the greater balance of the missions weapons cache, communications and survival equipment; had been laminated messily across the planet surface due to the importunous and, I might add, suspiciously accurate direct strike from our stricken dropship as it alighted somewhat vertically to evacuate our rag-bag outfit from this Godforsaken rock.
Naturally, the crash had comprimised the facilities primary cooling tower, so that within the next four hours an area of twenty kilometres was destined to become a smouldering radioactive crater containing various swirling trace elements that microscopic analysis could grudgingly identify as human.
You certainly had to hand it to those well organised and singleminded aliens. If not, they had a depressing tendency of tearing your head from your shoulders and taking away whatever it was regardless.
So once again the best laid plans of mice and men had been rent asunder, stamped mercilessly into the ground, lost, found, used as firelighters and then unceremoniously flushed down the lavatory.
What was clearly required here was a wickedly cunning strategy.
Mad King Ruprecht to the fore!
After the compulsory log in errors and page unavailable messages we were eventually able to utilise the facility mainframe to peruse the labrynthine floorplan schematics in order to establish a fitting location to mount our stand.
A search of the APC wreckage had elicited four functional pulse rifles with fifty rounds a piece, one flamethrower containing sufficient fuel to prepare one thin slice of toast, a crate containing twenty hand grenades, two motion sensitive sentry guns, three compact soldering kits, a stick of brownish celery and the slightly foxed head of a small plastic dolly.
Having chosen the Medilab as our base of operations I set my grim survivors to work; sealing and reinforcing the access doors, soldering thick steel plates over bulkheads and redistributing the heavier items of medical equipment into a series of defendable breastworks in anticipation of the inevitable breach. The sentry guns were established along the corridors of the labs two major accessways, each one primed with two hundred high explosive rounds and programmed to deliver a deadly salvo at even the tiniest hint of movement.
It had been an exhaustive hour of frantic activity but I was confident that we had achieved total security and grinning broadly I slid home the cartridge of my pulse rifle with a satisfying metallic click.
Wiping perspiration and an errant wisp of hair from my forehead, I turned and companiably patted the shoulder of an eight foot high, ichor dripping biomechanical nightmare with powerful slavering jaws and wickedly barbed prehensile appendages.
"Well, I should like to see them get in through tha...."
I had led a crack team of professional Colonial Marines to the surface of Planet LV426 in order to re-establish the unaccountably comprimised communications uplink with the settlers of a multi million dollar terraforming facility and eradicate any signs of suspected xenomorphic infiltration.
Of course, courtesy of an incredulous extravaganza of misfortunate events I had almost immediately found myself reduced to a mere handful of demoralised marines and an extremely irritating young girl who's sickly twee manner could yet prove an invaluable weapon in it's own right.
Within an hour of dropship dust-off the majority of my platoon had been maimed, mangled, disembowelled, liquified by acid or carried away screaming for purposes best left to the imagination. The misbegotten alien menace were well known to be vicious, murderous automatons; unthinking, unstoppable and totally dedicated to the extermination of any other species. Today, however, they had been far less sophisticated and our operation had suffered an irrepairable crimp as a result.
Soon after, our APC; containing the greater balance of the missions weapons cache, communications and survival equipment; had been laminated messily across the planet surface due to the importunous and, I might add, suspiciously accurate direct strike from our stricken dropship as it alighted somewhat vertically to evacuate our rag-bag outfit from this Godforsaken rock.
Naturally, the crash had comprimised the facilities primary cooling tower, so that within the next four hours an area of twenty kilometres was destined to become a smouldering radioactive crater containing various swirling trace elements that microscopic analysis could grudgingly identify as human.
You certainly had to hand it to those well organised and singleminded aliens. If not, they had a depressing tendency of tearing your head from your shoulders and taking away whatever it was regardless.
So once again the best laid plans of mice and men had been rent asunder, stamped mercilessly into the ground, lost, found, used as firelighters and then unceremoniously flushed down the lavatory.
What was clearly required here was a wickedly cunning strategy.
Mad King Ruprecht to the fore!
After the compulsory log in errors and page unavailable messages we were eventually able to utilise the facility mainframe to peruse the labrynthine floorplan schematics in order to establish a fitting location to mount our stand.
A search of the APC wreckage had elicited four functional pulse rifles with fifty rounds a piece, one flamethrower containing sufficient fuel to prepare one thin slice of toast, a crate containing twenty hand grenades, two motion sensitive sentry guns, three compact soldering kits, a stick of brownish celery and the slightly foxed head of a small plastic dolly.
Having chosen the Medilab as our base of operations I set my grim survivors to work; sealing and reinforcing the access doors, soldering thick steel plates over bulkheads and redistributing the heavier items of medical equipment into a series of defendable breastworks in anticipation of the inevitable breach. The sentry guns were established along the corridors of the labs two major accessways, each one primed with two hundred high explosive rounds and programmed to deliver a deadly salvo at even the tiniest hint of movement.
It had been an exhaustive hour of frantic activity but I was confident that we had achieved total security and grinning broadly I slid home the cartridge of my pulse rifle with a satisfying metallic click.
Wiping perspiration and an errant wisp of hair from my forehead, I turned and companiably patted the shoulder of an eight foot high, ichor dripping biomechanical nightmare with powerful slavering jaws and wickedly barbed prehensile appendages.
"Well, I should like to see them get in through tha...."
