USCMRPG

2179 AD, 6th October
Location: Sol system, Earth, United Americas, New York
Mission timer: 00:42:33

The woman was dead within seconds and the chest burster were shredded by Sixtus burst as the critter splashed to the floor of the tunnel. The explosive tipped armour piercing rounds made quick work of the soft body. The woman looked peaceful now. Her anguished face relaxed and serene. Jean bent down and closed the womans eyes, her pupils excessively dialated. Jean halted for a second and then lifted the womans eyes again. Her processor worked for a few seconds, she followed the womans arm down towards the underarm. Her sensors registering the touch but she did not feel it as a human would have - The now dead and rapidly cooling skin. The once soft warmness would soon be replaced by a stiff cold. Jean looked closer and saw that the womans arm were punctuated multiple times like needle pricks. "She were on something...possibly some kind of drug" Jean said mechanically. "I need some samples"

The Marines of section I were not listening however, their attention were towards the not so distant gunfight were shots still were fired. The rounds fired now seemed one sided, M41s mainly. The Marines of Section II stood against the wall on each side of the opening from were the rounds had come. "Hold fire!" Pitt shouted. Another burst rang out from an eager marine. "Hold fire godamnit!" he shouted again. The silence rushed in on them like water splashed from a pond by a car tire. Their ears rung fiercly and for the first few moments they could barely hear anything at all beside that. Then slowly their hearing started to adjust again. The water flowing past, the dripping from the roof and the soft moaning wind in the pipes. No one fired back at them. Pitt chanced a look, well aware that someone might be pointing in his direction with a weapon. The looked into the pipe, trigger half depressed as he rounded the corner. Nothing. The pipe was empty. Stormhurst brought up his tracker. The tracker started it's eerie "toc-toc-toc" sound. "What the fuck?" he said. "Its reading wrong" he continued. "Nothing". "You are reading it wrong" Pitt said grabbing it. But it still showed nothing. Whatever or who ever had shot at them had more or less vanished into thin air.

Positions:

Section 1: C2:9
Section 2: B4:3
Support squad: C3:9

>

patch heard jeans request "i'll take them, so quinn can get back to his squad and see what the hell this gunfire is about" patch responded.

he carefully slung his weapon over his back and opened his medical kit, taking blood, hair, and skin samples as well as a mouth swab. he made sure he videoed the whole corpse and took high resolution stills with his shoulder cam.

once all the samples had been taken he moved back into position near sarge and jean and tapped the general comms Chanel "this is command, all squads report sitrep , over" patch was trying to gain more info for Simmovic everything had happened all at once, what was the gunfire all about? what happened to the contact behind them? was anyone injured?

patch turned to Simmovic " sarge you want me to infom the Lt about this?" he nodded towards the now dead woman

Dirk came around the corner, ready for who ever had been shooting at him and his squad. Instead of a fight, he found nothing. The pipe was empty. Not a trace of whoever had been there could be found.

"What the fuck?" He whispered as he looked around.

"Command, theis is Pitt. We had contact, but... They vanished. No trace on the tracker or anything else. We are holding position until we figure this out." Dirk said over the comm


"Morse, get up here. The rest of you stay sharp. We don't know where that bastard is." He said

Despite the confusion that had insued as a result of the shots that had been fired at them, the 'Easy 3's' reformed rank fairly quickly. As they had moved forward, Morse retook his position at the rear. Dirk apperantly had continued on to check around the corner. Morse, though not knowing how to read the motion tracker had learned to recognize the sounds it made. But the usual "Whine of Death" as the tracker generally gave off when contacts were around did not sound. Morse was confused by this, it didn't make any sense. They had been fired on, but they hadn't heard any splash or sound that suggested that the blind shots they'd returned had hit anything.

Dirk Pitt wrote: "Morse, get up here. The rest of you stay sharp. We don't know where that bastard is."

Upon hearing this, Morse quickly shifted position. Almost without thinking he'd switched from his wide firing stance at the rear to a quick step forward. He whipped around the corner, bringing the heavy M41A-E2 to the same firing position he'd had at the rear. His light panned over the walls, on to the stone ceiling, and to the water on the ground. It was almost identical to what he was watching at the rear.

"What do ya got? Morse shot back at Dirk, keeping his eyes locked onto the tunnel before them.

< Tag Dirk
< Roll Awareness

LCpl Stormhurst scanned the main tunnel branch with his shoulder lamp, that continued on past the tunnel that had the contact just moments before.

He swept the tracker around.
"Sgt Pitt, I think our tracker is wacked, should I run a diagnostic on it? It'll take a few moments but the function will be down while it runs the internal check. What ya want me to do?"


"Monks, watch the other way."  

"Are we going to go search aways up the tunnel or what?"  

Roll Alertness, Awareness, perception.

OCC: what do we see up the tunnel? Does it bend or dead end or shrink or what?

Stormhurst looked up the tunnel and saw how it ended with a grating. Water was splashing through it from a ledge slightly above. The brown, murky, water was foaming slightly. But no movement.

Once Jean had wrapped her hand up, she could easily have passed for an injured human being. Her voice processor was still at 100%, her other hand was working fairly close to normal and she could hold her gun. Even for an artificial lifeform, Jean suspected that the girl she was caring for was perfectly alright. Jean had no idea she was infected. She didn't believe it until the chestburster ripped out of the girls chest.

After collecting samples, she put them in her bag and then limped over to the dead Xenomorph chestburster. Jean pulled out an acid-proof bag. She opened up the top of the pizza box that the Alien had landed in before it was shot, she looked inside the box and saw that the dead aliens blood had burnt a hole right into the center of the box. Jean pulled the box off of the Xenomorph and pushed it into the bag.

Sam continued to scan the tunnel in front of her position from left to right; and occasionally glanced around and up the walls and ceiling to make sure there was nothing near her that wasn't Sheppard or another Marine. Her shoulder started to ache a little from where the stock of her M41 was pressed into it.

After nothing had happened for a few minutes, she almost jumped when the message came over the comm that the civilian woman was KIA. Sending a silent prayer for the poor woman, Samantha kept alert to any signs of the contact that had been detected in the vicinity of the Support Squad. Frowning as nothing seemed to be happening; Sam decided to risk a quick message.

Speaking into her headset, she said; "Sarge, this is Hall from the Support Squad; we've got no activity here, repeat, no activity. Do you want us to continue to secure this position, over?

Morse kept his wide stance and remained watching the tunnel a moment. He then eased up and turned to the squad.

Dirk Pitt wrote:
What we have is a missing gunman. Where the hell could he have gone? You have any thoughts? Dirk asked as he lit a cigaret.
\

Morse started to think on it for a moment. He chewed his gum heavily and looked up at the ceiling. There was no difference between it and the ceiling of every other corner of the tunnel. "Aint likely we shot em, not with the accuracy a this bunch. Morse said still thinking. "I'm doubtin a sewer rat Yorker's done got some intereferin device, so I'm figurin there's only one alternative." Morse quieted his voice in case he was correct in his assumption. "Its a good bet we got someone done layin like a corpse under the water not makin a move or peep. Ridin like a roach till hopin to snap another shot without us seeins where it came from." Morse was loud enough so the squad could hear but kept his voice low enough so it wouldn't carry down the tunnel.

< Tag 3rd Squad.

The partially injured Android still looked human and her internal processor was telling her to be 'glad' about that. Jean finished packing all of her samples and she tucked them nice and neatly next to the teddy-bear that she found in the sewers when she first came in with the team. She took the hand that still had fingers and ran them through her hair to get the dirty near-plastic strands out of her eyes. The hair felt real, and looked real, but upon extremely close inspection under a microscope, anyone could tell that it was almost doll-hair.

This allowed her to swipe some of the grime off of her head quite easily, but her hair was still wet from the sewer water and rain runoff from the streets above. Jean thought about taking her flightsuit back from the dead girl she tried to help before jumping back in with Patch and the others; she looked at her and decided that even in death, the poor girl should have her dignity. A machine could do without clothes and Jean, herself, wasn't exactly naked. The underwear she had on was comparable to a swim suit so it wasn't a big deal.

Oddly enough though, there was something hidden deep down in her subprocessing that silantly begged for a hot shower or bath, clean dry clothes, and bright lighting. Jean was doing just fine with eight fingers and a busted servo that still works to most of it's degree on her left hand. She tested her gripping strength after getting her fingers out of her hair. She still had good motor funciton considering the hell she had been through.

The skinny girl hardly made a splash when she jumped down into the muck with Patch. She double checked that her backpack was zipped up airtight. She pulled the straps tight so that the pack pushed against her bare lower back. She could feel the pack starting to float above the water but even at ninety pounds, she was capable of making sure that the pack wasn't too demanding on her and where it wanted to go.

"You've been quiet for a while, Patch. Are you okay?" Jeans soft voice was full of heart and concern. She reached out and touched his arm with her good hand. "We should close this snare and finish what we came here to do. Then, we can spend a lot of hours standing under a spicket spewing hot clean water and murder a few bars of soap." Jean joked. Well, the soap would be gone but the new analogy she forumulated for the marine seemed whitty enough for her processor to emit.

Pitt moved closer to the grating. The water was deeper than it first seemed here and the grating didn't move all the way to the bottom, You could dip under and continue up the ledge further in - It was cramped but it was manageable.

Kurosaki stared at the chestburster for a long time, struggling against the impulse to poke it with a stick or to run away screaming. Kurosaki moved towards Dugan, his eyes not leaving the pizza box.

"Simovic, what's the next plan?"

"Command, this is third. We're on the move. Out"


"Morse, we're going to check this out. Get the men and follow me under here."


Dirk spat out his cigaret, dipped under the grating and continued up the ledge. The first thing he noticed was that it was a tight fit. No room to get out of the way if the gunman started up again. Flipping down his IR he kept moving.

(Roll Alertness, Awareness, perception)

Obi's Post:

"Command, this is Pitt. We had contact, but... They vanished. No trace on the tracker or anything else. We are holding position until we figure this out." Dirk said over the comm.

Listening to the confused radio chatter, Obi absorbed the information.  Those trackers either work or they don’t.  Still how the hell could a person pull a vanishing act like that?   Obi thought with a worried expression.  Walking backwards he moved up to catch up with the rest of Two Section.  As he moved, more reports of the vanishing contact came over the radio net.  One woman KIA and now people taking shots at us and disappearing, this is fucked.  

Catching up with SGT Ishizawa, Obi peered over his shoulder and looked at the SGT’s motion tracker.  The screen displayed nil contacts as the tracker carried out its function.  Looking at the SGT, Obi whispered softly shaking his head, “ Not a damn thing, we should have picked something up if it fell back.â€