A Stitch in Time

[Camella]

Nick got on his radio quickly and relayed the orders from Paulus, before he turned his attention to Camella. She was being antisocial, but he couldn't blame her. It was he who had stepped on her bullet wound, after all, which had to hurt like a bitch. It also didn't help anything that she was around people she didn't recognize.

"You know, right now you are lucky to be alive." Nick said, trying to break the ice with her for the third time. He couldn't think of much else to say at the time being, but he was pretty sure he didn't deserve the rude remarks she was giving him everytime he tried to speak to her before.

"Do you like making a fool out of yourself by stating the obvious, you jerk?"

"I told you before, my name is Nick and I never had any intention of hurting you. I can help your body heal it's own wounds, but you are going to have to trust that I mean you no harm, Miss... You know, I never got your name"

"My name is Camella, and trusting you would be a hell of a lot easier had you not stepped on me earlier."

Nick sighed, this conversation was going nowhere.

"Will you please let me treat your wounds?"

The girl named Camella hesitated a bit then nodded. Nick quickly and carefully treated her wounds and bandaged her up as best he could. He gave hersoome splints for her legs as well. This took all of ten minutes.

"Don't try to walk, by the way." Nick warned, "You will likely only injure yourself more."

[Saxon]

Hearing the heavy, icy white crunch beneath his footsteps, Smitty carefully pulled one foot in front of the other as he side-stepped a tripwire. Each step seemed to put a greater burden upon his weakened heart, the survivalist walked like a man whose last plea for clemency had been wrenched from his grip. Damn it, the mercenary thought with a pang of realization, The bastard cheated! Smitty and three others had drawn straws to see who would take up this miserable trek, and he should've known better then to believe Vince, the local card shark, had been playing straight.

Smitty growled under his breath as he looked behind him, his comrades urging him on with silent whispers and obscene gestures. I'll knock his teeth out for this, he resolved. With plans of cold revenge gripping his attention, the mercenary turned back to the scene at hand and continued to move about the steel web. Marked in squares, the tripwires served much more as a guideline for the mercenaries, rather than a deterrent for intruders. Taking steps in a continuous L-shaped pattern, Smitty had steeled himself for situations like this.

Hearing the sound of footsteps other than his own over the blaring sound of shouts and maniacal laughter from inside the building, the survivalist chanced a look up and stopped dead. Bathed in lime-light, the mercenary had seen the barrel of the rifle first that bore down on him. Behind the gun, a woman decked in kevlar not unlike his own was aiming at him with the precision of someone who had a certain military expertise. The most peculiar thing was that she hadn't been wearing the goggles that allowed her night vision, let alone did she look all the bright anyway. How does she..?, Smitty thought before it struck him like lightning.

In a split second the goggles were in the air, the luminescent green lens that had given the sniper the unfair edge she needed were shattered at the sound of a jarring crack that could only be deduced as to be a gunshot. Only a few feet too many stood between Smitty and the wall of the warehouse, the survivalist ran haphazardly into the same darkness that blinded him. Stumbling over his own feet, the mercenary felt plumes of frigid snow shoot up behind him as the woman set after him in a trail of gunfire.

Had it been luck or fate, Smitty hadn't the slightest, but he staggered back at the slap of cold, unforgiving masonry of the eastern wall. Taking a few seconds to recover, the mercenary rubbed the side of his head and tried to get a firm grip back on reality. Letting a rush of air hiss through his clenched teeth, Smitty dug into his pack for the claymore, the survivalist could feel the hard plastic of the heavy burden and hoisted it from its resting place. The explosive device felt cold and unfeeling in his hands, but pulling the four clamps from either side of the octagonal, the mercenary's thoughts dwelled only on how close he had been to death. If I had only been a few seconds off, he began to think but dismissed it instantly. There wasn't any need to dredge up the past with questions like 'what if' or 'what could've been'. Shoving the claymore against the reinforced granite with a satisfying crunch, Smitty looked from either side of him and began to push on the hard rubber keys until red numbers flashed before him.

00:45

" Just like clockwork," Smitty scoffed as he pulled out his glock and heard the grim, foreboding beep of the device as it ticked away. The mercenary put his left hand against the wall and felt the cold, smooth texture of the granite as he slowly edged his way towards what he thought to be a safe place to hide. Faster and faster the survivalist walked until he broke into a brisk jog and then into a run. More and more Smitty felt confidence quell within him until his empty hand stabbed at the web of mesh that had to be the fencing.

In seconds the mercenary was up and over the fence, his knees the first to come in contact with a rough patch of frozen snow," Oof!"

" Gotta get the fuck out of here," Smitty wheezed as he got to his feet, the idea of shrapnel being flung at him entirely unacceptable. Not after all that, the survivalist reasoned as he shot up and began to search for Paulus under the sight of dim torchlight. As he made it around the bend of the warehouse and out of sight of his own squad, the heavy blow that caught the survivalist in the head wasn't as jarring as the explosion from the chorus of shattering explosions coming from the western side. Crumpling to the ground, Smitty felt darkness rush towards him and the last thing he heard before his own claymore went off was the ominous chuckle of a mysterious gravelly voice.

~*~

[Saxon]

The gray, opaque dust that had once been a solid wall of granite, and four feet thick, had smothered the raiders and rioters alike in a dense fog that no man could escape. As predicted by Darrel, the walls had been pulverized by the combined concussion of the claymore and the homemade mines that had sat in the fields for months. Crumbling masonry fell in a pattern that could only have been made by raw, awesome power of destruction. The first thing to enter the minds of rebels as they stared into the graying fog and into the twilight of dawn was the spine-chilling cold and crackling fear that simultaneously bit into them.

Armed to the teeth with mysterious weapons, the dire intentions of Wkigi's men had been all but crushed along with the walls that had helped blanket their fear and paranoia and feed the kind of madness only desperate men could know. Either blown to smithereens by the initial blast or pan caked under the same thick, rocky exterior designed to protect them, the corpses of hundreds of the rioters hanged about the depot and painted it in red ruin. Long moments passed that boggled the mind; It had been sheer jubilee a few seconds ago. A lifetime ago.

Men and women alike had laughed and danced to the caterwauling sounds of grating music. People hid in the sacred, graying shadows to commit their deepest, darkest desires without fear of being reprimanded for it. Men's throats were slit for loot or swag they had obtained during the sacking of the city. Chaos reigned and for the first time in decades, the citizens of Rkam could confide in their dark, twisted fantasies. Their leader, Wkigi, had forsaken them to his office where he enjoyed the fruits of his own pre-pubescent harem, the husk of a man fully content on savoring the ripe, bruised fruit of his hard labor. As all of these things coalesced and mixed into some sort of primitive quittance, the deafening explosion that followed caused the rioters to scatter like cockroaches caught under blinding lamp light.

The few that screamed listlessly ran about wildly, and hid in the very darkness they still held sacred. The rest were in a state of utter shellshock and bedazzled to the point of becoming catatonic. These people weren't soldiers; they were peasants. They were God-fearing men and women that had been twisted by a desperate man and decades of unrelenting abuse and neglect. They weren't experienced or even had the inkling of what it was to see an explosion of that magnitude. The claymore had destroyed more than just those walls. They'd crushed the spirit of Rkam's last-ditch effort to become free. They hadn't a chance as they stood in awe and watched as the world around them came crashing down. Some wept; others convulsed from hysterical shock, but most simply stared on into the abyss wondering what cruelty the Thaynes or Sway had wrought upon them.

~*~

The mixture of brackish blood and the faint odor of asbestos wafted in Paulus' nostrils as he walked across the charred crater that had once been his first and last line of defense. Gripping the Remington tightly in a stony, calloused hand, the middle-aged merchant strolled onward as he watched his mercenaries dash towards the ravaged opening and became lost in the pewter-hued fog. It wasn't before long before he heard the sound of gunfire rattling off inside cavernous depths of the depot he had built. An alien, high-pitched wail hissed in the air with an eerie similarity of a cat being caught in a conveyer belt. It sounded alien and foreign to the trader who had a almost unsurmountable knowledge when it came to his armory.

" That can't possibly be good," Paulus growled under his breath to nobody. Stopping suddenly to listen to the noise once more, the commander fought reason and logic before bellowing instinctively," Go!"

Paulus watched as two of his most trusted cadets left his aside to attend the battle, leaving him to his own devices. Ambling up the mound of rocky, basalt ruin of granite, the merchant and two of his most trusted cadets disappeared into the remnants of his property.

~*~

[Saxon]

If the outside of the trader's warehouses contrasted with Rkam, then even in ruin, the insides were still a wonder to behold. Steel-bound crates twice the size of an average man laid stacked precariously about the place, that had created a sort of complexity akin to a labyrinth before the resulting explosion had blown most of what was left of the stores to pieces. The place looked reminiscent to some sort of abandoned factory, where rails and steel catwalks criss-crossed over, under, and around the merchant's wares in order to access them without much need for machinery. Everything one could think of could be found here; weapons, food, clothing, and fuel that had lain stacked in the crates now most of it was either gone or covering the floor in a mess of junk. It was a wonder in itself how Paulus could afford nearly a dozen of these warehouses that dotted around Salvar inside carefully chosen city-states as a sort of supply depot when times were rough, let alone his ventures into the desolate wasteland itself.

It stood as a testament to the merchant's rivals of his obvious superiority and even behind a chain-linked fence, no less. They had been well protected, in fact, it was still a mystery as to how Wkigi had gotten past a small brigade of mercenaries that had been stationed there, the complex security system, and the six-inches of steel barricaded doors that separated the rest the supplies from Rkam. Pushing his way through the blinding gray soot that hovered in the air, however, the first of Paulus' mercenaries erupted from the small pocket of gas carrying a carbine in one hand and a hunting knife in another.

Putut, tut, tut, tut!

Bullets were the last sound a man Zaya knew to be Harry Mckenzie heard as hundreds of them tore through the mercenary as soon as he emerged from the dense, suffocating mist. Spattered red, Zaya could only look on in horror as she witnessed the innards of her crewmate splatter the surrounding area in slow motion with a sound not unlike rotten milk being hurled from a glass and onto the ground. Still standing, the warrior's bifurcated remains wisped with remnants of smoke as the legs slowly gave and what was left of Harry crumpled to the ground.

Slowly the whir and whining grind of the unfamiliar weapon ceased, and instinctively Zaya seized the opportunity to turn right and break into a haphazard dash as she roared," Get to cover! Hide, damn it, hid-" Not getting to hear the rest of her own sentence, the captain felt her legs pump harder than they ever had before as she heard the weapon begin to grind again. Quickly bits of hot lead zipped into the ground and trailed plumes of debris behind the mercenary until she disappeared around a gargantuan overturned mound of rock. The pop and crack of granite becoming gravel under the barrage of bullets caused Zaya to hit the cold ground with a thud and covered her head, closing her eye as bits of dust painted her form a strange and unnatural gray. Opening her eyes, the warrior hoped to Hromag that her squad was smart enough to stay out of the open.

Instantly the entire fringe of an exposed hunk of granite was sheared off by the awful power of the mysterious gunner that took to the captain like a wolf to lamb. Pulling herself up, Zaya sat against the cold rock as she caught sight of a pair of whimpering peasants cowering in the corner. Check, reload, contact, sang the mercenary's old mantra within her mind. Realizing she was still holding her scorpion in a white-knuckle grip, the captain eased and tried to relax as she could feel herself shake uncontrollably. Pulling out the narrow clip of her machine gun reflexively, checking the ammo, and then shoving it back in with a click, Zaya snapped back the slide of her weapon and reached for her radio inside her pocket as she carefully watched the cowering rioters out of the corner of her eye.

" Agh! This is Matt here commanding for the right flank, covering for you, Smitty, where the fuck are you! Over," the radio reverberated over the echo of gunfire and hiss of static.

Pushing the black plastic button of the device Zaya looked whence she had come before saying," Matt, this is Zaya; I'm pinned down by some sort of gunner and I'm in need of assistance. The bastard blew Harry to bits before he could even flinch and I was right behind him. I managed to stow away and I need somebody to come dig me out and probably the entire left flank. Does anybody copy?"

" We're under the same fucking treatment, Cap'n, any sort of plan coming to mind? Over," Matt's voice answered.

The tumblers within Zaya's mind began to turn as she considered her options and the thought came to her and she responded," I've got an idea. Standby, over."

Pulling a round pocket mirror from her coat, the captain held it in one hand as she grabbed a nearby piece of long, broken steel rebar and a hunk of plastique within another pocket she had been saving for the right occasion. Clumping the dense, stable explosive onto one side of the piece of steel, the mercenary carefully pressed the back of the mirror to it until she was sure it was stick. Sliding toward the end of the mound, she carefully stuck the mirror from safety and steered the mirror from the reflection of her own face and into the dreaded gloom.

Zaya held her breath as she looked about and it took her several long moments before she could see the giant figure on the catwalk that had contrasted with the shadows. Whoever he was, the assailant bore a weapon that the captain had never even seen before, and was willing to bet half her crew hadn't either. Seven, huge greased cylinders shot from some sort of base from the darkness, even in the dark the obvious wisps of smoke gushed from the barrels indicating the awesome power of such a weapon. Positioned in such a way, the looming figure had a panoramic view of the entire warehouse, making him far more deadly than if he had been on the ground.

It wasn't until she saw them that Zaya couldn't believe it; skulking amongst the shadows more than three scores of men crept gingerly about the catwalks, armored with kevlar and armed with more alien weaponry. It wouldn't be too long until the managed to encroach on her squad's position and destroy whatever foothold they had. Tilting the mirror inch by agonizing inch, the mercenary followed one of the skulking defenders and watched as his dark outline in the dull gray moved slowly in her direction," Who the fuck are these guys," Zaya asked with a perplexed look on her face.

It wasn't until the figure walked through a glimmer of flames that the mercenary spotted what she had secretly feared. Embroidered on the kevlar vest of the strange man was the same blood-red insignia she had found on the sniper. Morgan's men, she scorned. Witnessing one of Paulus' rivals was like spotting a lioness prowling in the tall grass; it never led anywhere good-- especially somebody belonging to Morgan Price.

Fishing for her radio, Zaya held it close as she barked," Morgan's in town, ladies. He's got his meatheads all bunked up in the catwalks looking to pick a fight. The bastard is probably the one who opened up the warehouse in the fucking first place. Over."

There was a long pause before Paulus' familiar voice erupted over the radio, his commanding demeanor even present from behind a faceless machine," Morgan? That prick. We'll deal with him later, but have you managed to find the gunner? Over."

Squinting into the mirror as she aimed it towards the gargantuan figure, Zaya managed to spot him a split-second before she could see the hint of a glimmering puff in the nearby area before her mirror exploded into shards. Covering her eye instinctively with her other hand, the mercenary's rebar was wrenched from her grip by the impact of the sniper's bullet, causing it to clatter noisily to the floor," Shit," she exclaimed.

Ignoring the whimpers of the huddled peasants, the captain stooped into a low crouch as she pressed the button of the radio," Seven cylinders that look to be rooted together, smoke was pourin' from it. The guy handling the damn thing must be a fucking mountain of muscle. Ov-"

" Damn it," Paulus blared over the radio," Where the Hell did Price manage to find it? A Minigun?!"

All of the color drained from Zaya's face as she heard these words. She hadn't the slightest what a minigun was, but it was the first time the captain had heard that pang of something in the merchant's voice she was too familiar with. Fear. Whatever this weapon was, it scared the shit out of Paulus, and the old buzzard was as tough as nails to boot. Standing, the mercenary made sure her head was hidden by the granite as she spoke into the radio," I'm not sitting around to find out whatever this is, Paulus. Western squads, take out Morgan's goons and try to get the gunner's attention, I'll try to circle around the bastard and put one between his eyes before I meet up with the eastern flank. Don't go to sleep now, boys. Over."

There was a round of 'Hoo-Ahs' before the radio fell into static, but it didn't drown out the unwanted footsteps clanging against the steel walkways the captain overheard. Zaya took the initiative this time and broke into another run as she wrestled her scorpion free from its holster. She wasn't about to let a bunch of religious nuts put a bullet in her head before she could return the favor.