Chương 34: Chapter Thirty - Plasma

There was a long, silent pause as Voidsmen and genestealers stared across the gap at one another. Then all hell broke loose.

"Orderly retreat! Keep that fire up!" the sergeant shouted. He whipped a short-barelled shotgun up and fired, punching a dozen pellets through the elongated skull of the nearest genestealer and splattering blood and grey matter across the grilled floor of the generator room. The genestealers howled. There may have been a few words mixed in with their screaming, but they were lost in the cacophony of guttural screaming. Alexis scrambled backwards, and so did most of the Voidsmen.

Some of them had guns in hand, and it wasn't long that, as they spread out, they started to fill the space within with lasfire that criss-crossed in the air and nailed a few of the nearest mutants. Then the return-fire started. Not all of the genestealers were drooling morons. Some of them ducked behind cover only poking out to level crude autoguns or stolen lasrifles towards the entrance.

Soon there was a smattering of return fire and Alexis yelped as a pair of long arms grabbed her around the middle and yoinked her back behind 054-648 and K84-321.

"Oh, thank you," she called out to KYS. The situation was deteriorating quickly. Alexis winced as she saw a Voidsman go down with a gurgle, clutching at his exposed and now-bleeding neck. She gestured, and KYS leapt on the man, whose gurgle turned into a panicked scream as she started to administer involuntary first aid. Others were going down as well, and the genestealers, after their momentary surprise, started a full-on charge. Some of them, it seemed, were like those she had encountered before.

Normal, or nearly normal, lower deckers, with only a few strange mutations showing, or sometimes none at all. Some of them, however, were different. These were more often than not the proud owners of four arms and they moved fast. One of them rushed forwards, a clawed arm swiping out to grab onto the lieutenant only for Sergeant Auscion to bash the butt of his shotgun in its face. He spun the weapon around and blasted the mutant's face off.

"Hold!" he shouted.

"There's no running from this, dammit! Hold!" That kinda worked. Alexis was upset to see a few Voidsmen at the rear turning tail and running, and some of the more... green looking ones simply stood there, staring, with mouths agape and eyes wide, but most of the 14th platoon did as their sergeant asked and held. They quickly took up a raggedy formation, one trooper on their knees, the other above them, standing.

It was far from perfect, and without cover they were taking potshots in return, but it let them put down more shots downrange without having to check their fire for friendlies.

"Let's do our part!" Alexis shouted to her friends. She dropped her borrowed lasrifle to the ground and spun her foam sprayer around. It wasn't the ideal weapon, but... Shooting a line out, she sprayed across the entire entrance, just a few feet before the tracks of the door. The foam started to rise and soon was nearly a foot tall, though it was rather uneven. It wasn't much, as far as cover went, but it was probably better than nothing, and really she just wanted a base layer to add onto later.

The effectiveness of cover, and how it even worked on a battlefield, was a very complex field of study, and one she wasn't entirely sure about.

"Focus their leaders, dammit!" the sergeant yelled. Leaders? Alexis squinted past K84-321's shoulder, trying to see what the Sergeant saw. There didn't seem to be a magos in this group, which was both good and not. More points would be nice, but fighting a psyker would be a mess. Then she saw it. Up and above, hanging off of a large glass cylindrical coil filled with brightly-glowing blue plasma was a genestealer that was clinging onto the coil with two arms and using the other two to point and direct the others.

The Voidsmen that had moved further back probably couldn't see him at all from their angle, but she had a nice line of sight on the mutant.

"054, that one!" she shouted. Her servitor friend didn't say anything, but she sensed confirmation through their shared link. The servitor's upper body shifted and he raised his rivet gun. Meanwhile, the genestealers weren't exactly stopping. Their initial charge had been met with a wall of continuous fire that had burned it out, but they weren't stupid. A dozen of them came charging out of cover, some of them holding onto the cut halves of barrels while others clung onto discarded tables and floor plates.

Nothing that would truly stop lasfire cold, but it provided some amount of physical cover, and hid the genestealers coming up behind them. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Those were bigger, chunkier fellows. Ogryn sized. They grunted and swore as some lasfire glanced off of their sides, but that didn't stop their steady advance.

"I got this!" the friendly Voidsmen ogryn shouted. Alexis winced. He might be big and tough, but she suspected that he did not 'got this.'

"CS-3-2/11, torch them!" Three things happened at once. First, 054-648 fired a shot from his large calibre option. Seeing as how he had time to aim, it was dead on. The shot punched into the genestealer leader's torso, slightly below his ribs, then slammed onwards, pinning the genestealer to the glass plasma chamber. The chamber was not rated for bolter fire. It cracked, then with a clink that was lost in all of the gunfire and screaming, a narrow slit broke on the surface of the container.

Pressurized plasma then proceeded to jet out of the container, created a twenty-feet long jet of nearly-invisible gas that terminated in a wash of blue fire that immediately immolated the middle lines of the genestealer formation and then proceeded to start melting some of the large, rather tough cogitators. Being that this was plasma meant to empower devices to harness the motive force, it almost immediately started to send sparks and foot-long arcs of electricity flying.

Second, Bubba the 14th platoon's ogryn reached the enemy front lines. He was armed with a heavy mace, which he swung into and through a metal case a genestealer was holding up as mobile cover, and also the genestealer themselves. The ogryn-sized genestealers took that as their cue to charge.

One of them tackled Bubba, only for the 14th platoon's biggest guy to execute a guardsman-standard throw, flipping the genestealer around and slamming him into the ground with so much force that the deckplates under Alexis' feet trembled. Third, CS-3-2/11 opened up with her welding spear. Seeing as how the servitor didn't want to hit a nominal ally, her shot was aimed off to the right slightly.

The lance of welding plasma (entirely different from the other kind of plasma causing issues at the moment) speared through one of the genestealer ogryns and then sliced sideways, cutting into the gaggle of smaller genestealers who had been using the advance as cover. The entire corridor went from moderately warm to unbelievably hot in a matter of seconds, and Alexis imagined that it was far worse for the genestealers within the plasma generation room.

The only problem was that she couldn't help but stare at the mess she was somewhat slightly responsible for.

"I'm going to have to fix that," she muttered. Her attention snapped back to the side where one of the genestealer brutes managed to shove its way through a line of Voidsmen with a heavy swing of its arm. It took a few shots in exchange, but didn't seem to care much at all about its accumulating wounds. Its target was obvious. The aberrant roared from its two heads, then brought a massive fist down, aiming at the lieutenant.

The young man was shoved aside roughly and crashed onto the deck a moment before the genestealer's fist rammed into the ground. The sergeant grunted, then brought his gun up and fired. It had the same effect as last time, turning the mean mug of the aberrant into giblets. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to kill the mutant. Its other head howled, and it swung its arm around, catching the sergeant in the midriff and sending him hurtling back. A moment later, however, the mutant was down itself.

Concentrated lasfire from multiple directions finally did it in and it slumped down, dead. Alexis licked her lips and refocused. A lot was going on. The genestealer's attack had been blunted, but she estimated that they had killed... maybe a third of them? All that at the cost of maybe a fifth of the platoon's strength, but now they were on a strict timer. Either they finished the enemy off and she was able to fix the plasma conduit, or more genestealers came from elsewhere and the situation deteriorated.

She was just starting to hope that things wouldn't go that route when the door at the far end of the generator room exploded. A moment later a gaggle of genestealers rushed through the dust and smoke.

"Oh boy," Alexis muttered. There were a lot of enemies. They were also a mix of the four-armed, stronger and faster moving sorts, and a lot of near-civilians armed with lasrifles and makeshift guns, she even noticed a few aberrants shoving their way through.

"Oh Emperor," the lieutenant said.

"We're fucked."

"Have no fear, loyal servants of the Emperor! I am here to kick ass and chew rations, and I'm all out of rations!" Alexis turned, and what she beheld simply did not compute. Sisters of Battle were not supposed to be that small, were they?