• This section is for roleplays only.
    ALL interest checks/recruiting threads must go in the Recruit Here section.

    Please remember to credit artists when using works not your own.

Futuristic Burning Jets Off Ganymede {p}

Grook

New Member

Harsh winds whistled across the frozen landscape of Ganymede’s surface, carrying with it shards of ice and rock. They left an erratic pattern on the fresh snow as they skipped against the tundra, finally laying to rest in crevasses and caves before they were so unceremoniously brought back out again by the winds. Like a stray god searching for guidance, one of these jagged shards of rock flew past a lone figure stumbling in the cold. They were haggard and moved in an unpredictable manner, but their outstretched palms were wrapped around a rusted pickaxe. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that this thing was a human being. And this human being was Andie Vasquez.

That morning, Andie had left in a peculiar hurry from her Junktown perch, recalling the warm garbage fire that lapsed in and out of her view when she groggily opened her eyes and put on her fielding suit. She took with her a handheld railgun, strapped clumsily to her back, and a heavy steel alloy pickaxe, a gift from her late grandfather and one which had gone through a number of near-death situations with her. Maybe it was the excitement that struck her veins like a silver bullet. Or maybe it was something else– fear, anticipation perhaps– which caused her to rush the application of her fielding suit, hop into her wretched and sputtering little field vehicle, and blast out into the white horizon, deep into a storm. Ice fields on Ganymede were something to be weary of, and Andie wasn’t a very attentive woman. So when she realized her suit had somehow sustained damage, a small pinprick of a hole just beneath her ribcage, she didn’t think much of it. It was something for her to think about later.

The only issue was that it was now later, and Andie was in the worst predicament she’d ever encountered on an ice fishing mission.

Cold air filled her suit and heat was rapidly seeping out. Mere minutes ago she had been comfortable, but now she was in the shivering cold, gritting her teeth and desperately clinging onto that pickaxe as she fumbled toward her ship. She was at least a half-mile away from it, that much she knew due to the markers she’d left in the ice. This was an error not of circumstance, but of Andie’s own negligence. And now it would kill her, she thought, as she pitifully scrabbled on the ground like a desperate lemming at the edge of a cliff. The temperature was dropping. Her lips had turned a dangerous shade of blue, and although she couldn’t see her hands, they were barely able to clasp around the hilt of the pickaxe, trembling and weakened from the icy cold. She could hardly hear her own thoughts over her teeth chattering loudly in her frozen-over helmet.

Andie had sent out several distress signals moments before from her suit, when she had the mobility to do so. She wanted to inhale sharply, to gasp for air, but the air burned her lungs everytime she breathed, so she kept her breathing shallow even as her lungs begged for air. Now she sent out one final message.

“A-Andie Vasquez, in. In Surface Area Four ice fields, unsure of coordinates. I need help. Suit has… suit has been punctured.”
 
Meanwhile Mia Witkowski was snug-as-a-bug, gently rocked by the engine's sputters and the ship's shudders as the old Varney skimmed its way back to Anat. All the noise of the machinery pleasantly obscured the howling of the winds, but through the windshield still she saw them, as they carried up the little ice-shards that the skimmer chipped away with its keel. And even without the windshield she could look to her instruments, and there the little pointer marked the direction of the winds, and she used that to keep the Varney on its course, so sooner than she could even hope she'd be home again in that little shack on the docks, sipping cocoa and listening to the Junktown radio's favourite old beats, while that beep.... beep.... beep.... of the emergency wavelength cut through in the back.

beep....

beep....

beep....


She shuffled a hand - very bravely! - out of the warm folds of her coat and into the half-frigid air of the little ship. The foam padding on the lever she grabbed was as cold as ice, she'd have sworn, but she was careful not to touch any of the metal just below. With a quick yank, the ship shifted; the noise of all the wear and tear subsided as it came in line again with the wind, and her hand darted back, like a fish who'd ventured out of the reef, into the warm, warm interior of her two-inch-thick coat.

There were two old heating units which she had the fond recollection of having worked rather well when she'd huddled up against them on Manny's hunting trips - the few she'd been on, where they'd caught little and laughed lots. But she had been smaller then, and, well, it was expensive. Expensive to keep the units in good repair, and more expensive still to keep them running. Manny'd made ten times what she could ever make - the market had been better, for one, and there was more money in hunting beasts than helping the sailors stupid enough to get themselves out here without the fuel to get back to base. Even then, she was sure he'd rarely used them when she wasn't onboard, and remembered him coming home with icicles still clinging to the ends of his 'stache and the tips of his eyebrows. Now, there was just the one heater that worked, and she'd have been hard pressed to prove it. So the fuel didn't get wasted, and the heater stayed off.

And she stayed comfortably bundled up. One good coat, two warm scarves each longer than she was tall, and a hat she could tug down over the ears so it would stay. It helped to cushion the vibrations, too - which was needed, on a seat that had lost as much padding as this.

beep...

beep...

beep...


Sometimes the newer hunters, the hot-shots who'd just scraped together the parts for an ice skimmer or the old dreamers who'd finally saved enough to buy themselves a ticket to the surface, would use the emergency wavelength to chat, figuring of all the channels it was the surest one to have people tuned in. But once they'd needed it themselves for the first time, that sort of chatter didn't happen again. Once you'd almost died out here, then - and only then, Mia was sure - you could count yourself among the sailors.

She'd 'christened' more than enough, hauling them back into dock on a tow-line if their engine was shot or passing them a gallon of fuel if they'd run short. Sometimes a real dedicated hunter would drop her a private line and she'd re-stock them with fuel and food and the other necessities she could carry, while the hunter kept on the trail of something big. Was important to keep those ones on the down-low - never could know if someone might follow her to poach a good kill.

But still, every time she heard that beep... beep... beep... interrupted with a buzz of static, a pause, and a voice, her heart dropped out of her chest.

Because for every dozen times that she'd saved a life or got a big tip from a big score, there was the memory of the ones who hadn't made it. The frozen corpses. The bleed-outs. The ships that had burnt a line and caught fire with the crew too close.

It was why she knew she couldn't do this job forever, and it was why she knew she would.

Buzz. Static. Mia shifted up in her seat, her head popping out just above the neckline of the coat like a little gopher out of its hole. She stared at the radio. Waited for the voice.

"A-Andie Vasquez, in. In Surface Area Four ice fields, unsure of coordinates. I need help. Suit has... suit has been punctured."

Her first thought was the sort she was ashamed of. How could you be so stupid?

But her second thought - well, no, her second thought scolded her for the first. It was her third thought that had one hand heaving the skimmer to the left and the other reaching for the old maps she kept on board, and pulling them down to sift through on her lap. Suddenly the cold wasn't such a problem.

Surface Area Four. Big spot. But she - the voice - had said ice fields, so Mia had to assume that meant in the fields proper, which cut down the total search area but not in a way that could save her time. She flipped over to the itinerary, a few notes from some of the hunters whom she'd befriended or whose friendship she'd inherited from Manny on where they'd been hunting lately and where they thought they might be in the next few weeks. Extra precautions. Good to be prepared.

She activated the Yeoh's channel, keeping the emergency wavelength on for receiving in the background. "This is the Varney, over. Anyone read?"

The reply came back almost immediately. "Ice Bird, copy. Mia, you out here? Everything okay?"

"Donny? Where's Maggie?"

This time there was a pause. Mia had been expecting to hear Donny's wife. He came back through. "She's doing the hunting, for now; I stay with the ship. Knee, you know?"

She did, and she didn't want to say "I'm sorry" again, like she had a hundred times before and felt powerless doing so, but...

"I'm sorry." This time, the pause was her fault. She cut back in before he had to think of something to say. "Uh, Donny, you're in Area Four?"

"Yeah, Area Four. And thanks."

Mia nodded. Her eyes kept peeled out the window, but she was still too far off to be picking up on anything. Desperation more than prudence. "Have you seen anyone else today? Looking for an Andie Vasquez, emergency response, just wanted to see if you had any leads."

"No coords?" There was a level of incredulity in his voice, but it wasn't mean-spirited. The Yeoh's had been doing this a long while. Some measures became so second-natured you lost the ability to comprehend a nature without them. "Sorry, sorry. Um, yes. I don't know if it's her but there was another ship we saw earlier. Big storm in the area, though. Maggie and I packed twice the stores, just in case. Didn't want you running out here in the middle of a snowsquall for us."

"Thanks Donny. Tell Maggie to keep safe."

"Copy that. You know her, checks everything I do twice rather than anything she does once."

She switched back to the emergency wavelength. She was probably close enough to get a good connection, now. "Andie. This is Mia, with the Varney. I'm coming to get you. Please, if you can see anything or remember any landmarks that I can use to find you. I'm coming."
 
The remorseless swing of the reaper’s scythe held Andie in its talons. The ice in her lungs felt like a fistful of razors weighing heavy within her chest, and each shuddering inhale only brought another spike of pain. Her extremities were numb now, fingertips blue and purple like a nasty bruise. She could only hope there would be a moment of solace, a brief second of painlessness, before that scythe came down on her. Death came so quickly. And all for one stupid mistake! She chided herself internally, then she noted that these would not be her final thoughts. What was something nice to think about before she met her fate? The only thing that went through her mind was the cold.

The radio in her snow-pelted helmet crackled to life.

Hallelujah! Andie rejoiced by clenching her fists into a tight ball. It sparked a few more times, and then a voice over the intercom, muffled but calm, lacking fear and urgency, came through. She nearly laughed in reply. Hot breath rose through the air, and she flinched again, struggling now to breathe. There was little doubt in her mind that help was on the way. The Varney? Strange name, but she couldn’t argue. This little odd rescue vehicle could save her life. The voice sounded vaguely female, somewhat familiar, and comforting, although she presumed that she only felt that way due to the nature of the situation. Andie had never been so vulnerable, now totally at the mercy of the wind and sleet and perhaps some mystery rescuer who might not make it on time. She peered through the fogged lens of her helmet, searching on the bleak white horizon for any tiny dark dot which might swoop down and spot her bright suit like a droplet of blood on a plain white sheet. The scene was so pristine, almost Edenic. The pain began to slip away. She wanted to wave her hands or jump up and down, but the frigid zephyr blew right through her limbs and seemed to paralyze her. How wonderful it would be to have warmth.

The blue roostwyrm she’d carried on her back was long abandoned, and she looked behind her, craning her neck to the azure nebulous creature she’d hauled up out of the waters of Ganymede. Its spines stuck out from the snow now, wrung out and gasping for air just like Andie was. But the beeping in her helmet and the frayed static felt like a heartbeat now, a pulse to some larger machine that would inevitably come to her aid. She recalled the frigid corpses, frozen and curled up, rigor mortis clenching their tiny swollen fists shut as their mouths gaped open, filling with sleet from the incoming storms. They were sometimes brought into Docktown, where funerals were held, closed-casket, to protect the peering, nervous eyes of children who would eagerly pace the wooden planks of the platform to get a glimpse of a sailor who hadn’t come back alive.

“I’m by… a…” she trailed off, searching for some kind of landmark that might be settled upon from an aerial view. There! The rusted remains of a crashed cargo ship stuck out from the white, the jarring diagonals of the ship’s body weathering against the freezing wind. “I’m by a wreck! An old hollowed-out c-cargo ship. I’m heading toward it now. Don’t… don’t have long, please hurry,” she pursed her lips, stumbling toward the wreck. She clung to her ice pick, dragging it along as her breath gradually become more shallow, more uneven, before at long last, Andie Vasquez collapsed.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top