[Citadel/Nimbus] A Party On The Rocks (closed)

A figure was lying in a small hollow in the ice, blending into the environment with her white full body suit. On her shoulder rested a long tube with an optical visor and a trigger arrangement, which was firmly grabbed by her hand. A blinking cross in her HUD indicated the target was locked.

She hesitated for a second – or did she only wait? – and then pulled the trigger. With surprising little sound, a missile left the tube, soon only visible as a very bright blue dot, there was no smoke trail.
She put the launcher down beside her and watched with her binoculars.

The projectile had a laser lock and was closing in on its target. Inside, the electronic brain prepared the detonation of its three staged warhead. At the gate distance, which was reached in less than three seconds, the first stage ignited, releasing a forward directed massive warp field, that would have been tearing down any shields of a vessel under the size of a corvette. The shuttle’s shields would have been a tough nut to crack as they had been specifically designed to withstand exactly such a weapon but – irony – they were not even activated, so stage one went into nowhere.

A lone sensor on the targeted ship recognized the warp field and initiated full countermeasure protocol. But the signal could not trigger any reaction anymore.

Fractions of a second later stage two of the warhead ignited in a massive EMP over the unshielded vessel. Every screen, every keyboard, every remote control, radio, even lighting or toilet heating seized to operate with one last flicker, some of them internally burned by the massive overload; only the sturdiest and most protected of systems, such as the failsafe of the drivecore kept running and their safety protocols kicked in.

But not before stage three of the missile detonated tenths of a second later. A conventional small armor breaking warhead burned through the metallic surface and detonated in the starboard engine, ripping out a large portion of the side of the craft, which bucked to the other side violently, before veering off over the hit wing.

All control surfaces were now only connected to a flimsy last-resort hydraulic system. A mechanical control column, normally hidden, now unfolded in the cockpit, penetrating oddly through a flickering holoscreen showing only an error message.

A simple mechanical automated gyroscope was trying to stabilize the craft, firing chemical thrusters – or those that still worked. But their fuel would not last long….

~~~~

Through her binoculars she could see the craft trailing smoke and flames as it went out of sight and down behind a ridge. The sounds were softened by the snow covering everything but the thud was unmistakable. She packed up and marched off the way she had come, soon disappearing between rocks and boulders.

"Just take a seat and enjoy the view, doctor!" Freh'ya said with a smile. "There's nothing to worry about."

Freh’ya was watching the peaks of black rock fly past them, as they followed the monorail. With one eye she observing the nav screen. The flickering interferences made reading difficult but they had a visual lock on the retreat now, being so close. Freh’ya could already see the blinking high tower on the horizon… what was that signal… wait.

“What the fuck….” She saw a very fast incoming blinking signal, unidentified but on collision course – and way too late. When she reached for the shield control, the display was failing under her hands… then hell broke loose and she had to hold on when the missile hit the ship.

“Dammit”… wherever she looked, no more holographic controls or screens…. “Total power loss!” just stating the obvious…

Looking out the windows (the panoptics were gone, of course), the ship was veering to the side and the icy glaciers, lined by sharp rocky ridges came closer at unbelievable speed and at a very crooked angle….

Basically at the very moment Arina realized something was wrong, a violent rocking threw her around in her seat, her head banging into a flickering and dying console… through pain and a haze of purple and bright spots she saw the cockpit failing. When the spacecraft was rolling, she was thrown from her seat finally and a terribly sharp pain shot through her side and head… her eyes flickered shut, just like the console…

"Power loss!" Rahi heard herself bark, at almost the same time as Freh'ya, and her hand flipped open a crisis panel and typed a quick code into an old-fashioned tactile keypad. "Assuming direct control!" Her mind catching up with her trained reflexes, she hoped she could, that the backup was still- yes, here was the control column. Bless the good old hardware.

"Hard control responding," she snapped as she tugged the column's handled into position and felt the mechanically-transmitted feedback through them. At least something was working. "Levelling, scanning for landing site!" 'Scanning' consisted of looking out of the windows - there was flat ice ahead, but an alarming number of outcrops of rock - but her crash training had drummed into her that it was advisable to keep reporting. You never knew what titbit of information, however trivial, might be useful to another of the crew - and it would be better for them to feel their pilot was managing the emergency, however tenuous that belief's connection to reality was.

'Levelling' was easier said than done; the shuttle was aerodynamically stable by design, but without main power they were starting to slew around, she was still fighting to get the nose pointed forward again, and it felt like the starboard hit had taken out a lot of control surfaces too.

"Engaging air brakes," she reported, hoping she sounded calmer than she felt; at least her voice wasn't so shrill anymore. Should she order the rest of the crew to medbay? Its emergency systems were hardened and isolated from the rest of the ship, the crisis grav fields would still work, the armour was intact - in theory, they could survive strapped in down there even while the whole ship flew apart around them. But no, there was no time - trying for altitude and time would put them further down the narrow end of the valley, and she couldn't be sure they'd make it into medbay in time.

She risked a quick glance around - Goddess, Arina was out, was she-? No time, ground first, then worry. The air brakes were working, more or less. Rahi wrestled Sala around to face nearly forwards, spotting a gap between a rocky ridge and an alarming-looking jagged spire - if they hit that they were gone, but the ground beyond was smooth and white.

"Initiating crisis landing!" she called. "Brace for impact, brace brace brace!"

She missed the spire - but overcompensated, and the edge of the ridge opposite dug a gouge through the underbelly beneath whatever was left of the starboard engine. Rahi felt the sudden wrenching turn and slammed the port brakes fully open - the distinctive whiplash as one of them snapped, but the others held just long enough. Praying that 'nearly recovered' was good enough she retracted the ventral brakes before they could hit the ice, fired the drogue grav-chute and emergency modules, and took one last look at the terrain ahead before dipping the nose.

Sala T'Era lurched as the chute slowed her, its drag reversing the pitch and tilting the nose up again, then the last-ditch hardened grav drive reached the end of its brief life and sailed off into the ice as the cable jettisoned, leaving the shuttle to the mercy of Lady T'Kiria's Observations on Motion and what little she had left in chemical thrusters. Sala hit ice with a crunch, skipped, hit again, this time digging its port edge in, and the craft slewed around as she dug a furrow out of the ground, throwing up a hail of snow and ice. The protruding edge sheared off, as it had been designed to do in this worst case scenario, leaving the shuttle skidding along on her smooth belly. One last impact - a rock somewhere, buried under the ice close enough to the surface - tilted her up at an angle, port leading this time, and then as she slammed back down she was slowing, digging in deeper, until finally her forward hull crunched against the ice and didn't crush through, and the stricken shuttle finally came to a halt.

Temria opened her mouth with a clever quip on her mind, but it died in her throat as the motion leapt up out of the corner of her peripheral vision. Time seemed to slow down with Freh'ya's exultation and the doctor immediately fell back to practice that had been ingrained into her psyche since her maiden years in the fleet, Bracing herself in the door-frame with every ounce of strength and desperation she could muster.

At the point of impact, the world seemed to catch up for lost time.

Temria was thrown back against the frame as compensation for their momentum ceased, the sensation of acceleration less debilitating than it was disorienting, somehow it felt dizzying, or somehow wrong, and she soon realized from the way she found it harder to keep from sliding to the left that the vessel was listing... she had to strap herself in...

Rahi said something, no, she was shouting, what'd she say?

The room surged at the sudden impact, and Arina hit the console hard, Temria could see her slip out of her seat, only for her eyes to be drawn to the sight of the ground rushing up at them. Her heart seized, the thought of her body being sheared and twisted against the rock awakening horrible, visceral memories that threatened her grip.

She wouldn't be able to hold onto this anyway, and releasing herself she dove for the unconscious diplomat.

Too late- the ship slammed into the icy surface and Temria's motion was immediately arrested by a hard collision with the floor, barely fast enough to register the way her left arm compressed, and eventually gave in, beneath her. Then she was moving again as the ship skipped off the surface.

Still reeling, the doctor grabbed hold of Arina as hard as she could, blue-white flames flaring off her body. With a desperate hope that she wouldn't emerge to find them both buried in an icy tomb, she braced her feet against the wall and enveloped them both in a stasis field, from which she'd perceive nothing else until it wore off.

As much as Freh'ya wanted to help, there was nothing she could do than hold on and watch. Crisis situations made her mind cold, sharp and precise. Every fear or emotion was drained from her mind. She saw how Arina was thrown free of her chair and the unexpected lurch of Temria for the diplomat.

She had not even realized that she had unfolded a bubble, engulfing everyone in the cockpit, it had just happened while her knuckles turned pink as her fingers dug into the armrests. The ship seemed to bounce from the glacier surface as they hit it relatively flat. The shearing of metal was concerning though. Then she was thrown forward with a last inertia as the shuttle came to rest in a snowbank or something.

Most of the light came through the windows, a bit of snow was visible in their corners, the emergency lighting was glowing in a dim blue shade. She took a deep breath observing the frozen pair on the floor. Not a bad move. Self stasis was extremely uncomfortable though and discouraged but in this case it looked like it had been the prefect thing. Temria seemed to have quite good biotcs, since stasis always had been her own most flawed combat application. But her cold mind was moving away from Arina and Temria right away as she'd have to wait until the effect wore off anyway. Until then the two would be as safe as they could be.

"Do you still want to go vacuum downstairs?" She asked the pilot through the deafening silence that had fallen.
"Are you hurt?" She herself wasn't but the two on the ground would need help when they came around again! She left her seat and opened the first aid hatch next to the elevator, there were band-aids and medigel. She turned to the stasis'd couple and hoped Temria's biotics would wear off soon.

"That was a last gen SAM with a multi stage warhead! How did this get here?" Who in all the abyss would want to shoot at their vessel and on Trategos at that? This was the safest place in the cluster and the Matriarch's place wasn't far away... the Matriarch! Whoever had been targeting them would want to target her as well. and he probably wanted to make sure they were finished. They should not lose time hanging around. But first things first, she needed to get everyone going again.

And all this in my best suit....

"You saved our collective tzus, Rahi!"

I am dead... I am ... no, light, purple light... I am paralyzed... oh goddess, not this, please, no.... I can't move.... can't feel.... I am paralyzed.... HEEEEEELLPPP..... oh goddess, I have no voice.... please make this is not what death is.... pleas make I am not locked in, Heeell.."edgfdflppggffff".

Stuttering and spitting was the only sounds coming from Arina's mouth when the stasis wore off. Her body hurt, her head hurt and blood was running her in the eye.

She caught her breath like a fish on land, clinging to the the body closest, which happened to be Temria.
"We're all going to die" she cried and started to wimper.

"Uh... um?" Freh'ya's quip jolted Rahi, who had been motionless, breathing in short gasps in the few seconds the shuttle had been still. It took her another second to realise what she was talking about - that joke she made, had that only been this morning? It seemed longer ago. She didn't know how to reply; luckily when Freh'ya asked if she was hurt, the familiar procedure kicked her training back into action.

"Uh no," she said quickly, flexing fingers and toes to make sure she could, and testing her limbs. "No, I'm okay." By the feel of it she would have some impressive bruises from where the seat had kept her in place during the crash, but that didn't matter.

She tested her weight on her arms a moment just to be doubly sure nothing was going to give way, then hauled herself out of her chair and turned, swallowing a cry when she saw Arina and Temria on the deck, before she recognised the stasis field for what it was.

"I, uh..." she shook her head slightly at Freh'ya's praise. "Should have... flown a more defensive course. Following the track was predictable, made us an easy shot." She grimaced quickly, realising what she was doing, and not wanting to get bogged down in self-recrimination. Time enough to be held to account for losing her ship and endangering her crew later - if they made it to 'later'.

"Medbay will be structurally sound," she reported. There was nothing they could do about the other two until the field wore off, so she concentrated on giving Freh'ya a full report. "We didn't hit hard enough to breach the armour around it. Hardware there should be salvageable. And the weapons lockers." Absently she opened a wall panel and pulled free a medkit, laying it on the deck close to the shimmering stasis field. "Other stores... Maybe crash damage. I'll uh, try to get the VI going, damage report, if not I'll make a visual check." Still moving somewhat automatically she opened another panel and pulled out the stored case within, opening it to reveal a trio of asari-made Rivebow rifles, and targeting visors. The case was cracked at one corner; Rahi studied the interior moulding, and was evidently satisfied that the impact hadn't damaged the case's contents. "There's cold weather gear, if it wasn't damaged. If we need to move."

She looked over at Freh'ya.

"I'd estimate... three, four metras, from where we were hit, to where we are now. No more than five. Assuming they're equipped for the terrain - not long for them to survey the crash site." So much depended on Arina and Temria, what condition they were in - if they could move easily, or not. Sala's hull would likely be a serviceable enough shelter from the elements, but it would also be one big target to whoever had shot them down, looking to finish what they had started.

She twisted around at a sound from behind, seeing the stasis fade away, and hearing the choked sob from Arina. Scrambling across the deck she looked imploringly at Freh'ya for an instant, looking for guidance, then shifted her gaze to the others, for signs of who was hurt and how badly.

Temria felt incredibly sore, her body straining in the tense position she'd been locked herself in; but she took solace in acknowledging it was all a matter of time now until she could move again, her noticing that pain a sure sign she was already starting to come out of it.

Her relief was answered by a sharp pain running up one side of her body.

The shock of it caused Temria to gasp, testing the utter limit of her returning range of motion. Something was clinging to her- crushing her, aggravating everything, but somehow granting her that first hint of definition between her body and the rest of the universe.

It was her arm, she reasoned soberly, that was giving her the most trouble. What began as a burning sensation all along her left side had sharpened itself into an intense pain at the center of a dull ache, every errant twitch, every motion or lack of motion causing it to intensify until she wanted nothing more than to cut the damn thing off at the elbow that she might find some relief. It was a familiar pain.

"My arm is broken." she said flatly, her voice calm and to the point, if a bit quiet- a testament to the amount of pain she was in. "Arina. Arina we're not going to die. We're not going to die. I need you to release my arm, please."

"It's not your fault, it's fucking Trategos and in visibility range of the Matriarchs retreat! This was not to be expected and I am afraid we have to move. We can't call for help..." she activated her Omnitol, which worked basically but showed ['no connection'] which meant, its range and power was too low to penetrate the interferences to connect to any network or satellite.

"... we are cut off and I have to assume we are a target. We and the Matriarch as well." She kneeled down next to the pair on the floor. The stasis grew thin by now but Freh'ya could see where Temria's arm was broken already, the purple matron frozen in motion.

A mere minute later, the two were free of the biotic field and Arina seemed in shock, tugging on Temria's hurt arm and crying. Freh'ya immediately cradled her head in her lap, stroking her face so she calmed down.

"We are all safe for now, nobody will die, we are alright. It was a crash landing but everything will be alright!" She spoke and forced Arina to look at her. the cut was nasty but not dangerous. Nothing medigel could not cure. She unpacked a spraycan from the medikit and sprayed it directly on the wound, shielding Arina's eyes with her other hand. the bleeding stopped immediately.

Watching Rahi tending to Temria, she already calculated their next steps.
"We need to move out, get away from the wreck. there are two option, trying to reach the monorail and try to call for help or try and reach the Matriarchal residence. I think we should go for the latter, because I think whoever was going for us will attempt to go for the Matriarch as well." Sunda control would have warned them if the contact to the retreat would have been cut already so Freh'ya assumed that nothing had happened yet. Speculation on their opponents was useless. She knew they had top of the line weaponry. Maybe pirates after all, hiding in the Silent Mountains. She would find out and make them pay, whoever they were.

"We need cloths and survival gear. And weapons, whoever can carry one." She looked at the doctor and her broken arm. She would not carry anything for a while and Freh'ya would be lucky if nobody had to carry Arina or Temria. From what she had last seen of the former mining facility, she estimated two days on foot given the environment. But with the two injured... she would have to check a map to see where exactly they had come down.

"Can you open the access to the lower level, Rahi?"

Arina immediately came to her senes when everyone was trying to calm her down but willingly accepted to bed her head in Freh'ya's lap.
"I'm ....sorry..." she whispered, sniffing. The medigel was helping with the pain immediately, she wiped her eye clean and watched the blood on her hand with some amazement. But Temria seemed even worse off, holding her broken arm. Arina flinched and blinked to get her mind clear.

Other than her head, she felt okay so she tried sitting upright, leaning against the console. Ohoooo.... slow.

"What just happened? Where did that come from? Where are they now?"

It was clear that the Sala T'era wasn't going anywhere in the near future but she had to get a clear picture of what had happened. She had been responsible for choosing this path. A look around the cockpit showed the destruction, all the screens were either off or flickering with error messages. Through the windows she could see an icy blue sky with scattered clowds... icy. It must be very cold outside. A shudder ran through her body.

Breathing shallowly, Temria took the oportunity at last to take inventory of her injuries. The arm was a given, of course, and was important not to let it's blazing hot pain distract her from anything potentially more serious... For the most part though, that had appeared to be the worst of it. A sharp pain on her left side when she tried to too deeply told her she had a bruised rib or two to contend with, her her entire body (and her knees in particular) were stiff and sore but for the most part would recover quickly. With a start she noticed a distinct coolness on her right abdomen, but discovered to some relief that it was simply a tear in her uniform.

"How much... time do we have?" she said through pained breaths as she forced herself to sit up, and eventually, climb to her feet without assistance, "I... will... need some help, but it'll be better for all of us if I can get this set and braced. We can do so quickly if the medical bay is operational."

She looked to Freh'ya defferentially "I trust your expertise on this... but I'll make clear regardless that we'll need more than medi-gel out there."

"Our crisis beacon's fired, so that worked," Rahilan offered, while Freh'ya checked ground comms with no success. "Assuming the EM case held, it should've reached comms altitude and started broadcasting our distress beacon. No way to update it, given the interference, but at least Sunda will know something's gone wrong when they pick it up." She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt; the beacons were made to survive this kind of disaster scenario on their ship and reach a clear comms area intact, but there was no way to be sure. Sunda would be missing their check-in via landline from the Matriarch's retreat soon in any case, and making enquiries... if the retreat was still secure. Don't think that until you have to. Still though, help - however swiftly it swung into action - would be some distance away, and their enemies, whoever they were, were a lot closer at hand.

"Um, there are hand and footholds in the elevator well," she added. "That'd be the quickest way. And there's an emergency access stairway on the port side, it's a bit cramped, but since the Doctor won't be climbing..." She trailed off with an apologetic look. "Freh'ya, could you help the Doctor...? I'll check the condition of stores and bring what supplies we have to medbay." It felt odd to her to offer the less complex task to the more experienced commando, but Rahi knew every inch of her ship (Former ship...) - it would be quicker this way.

She turned to Arina, hoping the shock of the crash had worn off. She had seem similar reactions before, and didn't think any less of the diplomat for it - she only had to think of her first hostile encounter.

"Ma'am," she offered gently, "can I help you below?"

Freh’ya nodded, hoping the beacon had not fried in the EMP. They had no means to check the signal.

Letting Arina sit and recover for a bit, she helped Rahi with the hatch and the doctor.
“I know…” she replied to Temria’s concerns. A plate was removed in the elevator shaft and an emergency duct was visible. Spacious enough for someone in a full body armor luckily. She tried to support the Matron as soft as she could but helping her into the hatch and lowering her so her feet could reach the ladder just wasn’t possible without putting strain on the arm. Freh’ya had noted the sharp intake of breath when she had put her arm around Temria’s chest. Hopefully she had no broken ribs. That would rule out any trip and she had a terrible urge to get away from the wreck…

Decades of huntress life: Stay in motion whenever you can, don’t let the enemy surround you, stay on the move, keep the initiative. She had piggy-backed wounded civilians through deserts and jungle before, it just had to work somehow.
The fact that nobody had come for the wreck told her that their opponents had no means of flying transport. Maybe they had to cover a distance on foot themselves that would buy the quartet some time. Nobody was expecting them, maybe the attack had been a potshot. If it wasn’t for the Matriarch she might consider staying but that was a risk she wasn’t willing to take.

Finally they had managed to lower Temria to the lower deck. Freh’ya pulled out of the shaft again and tended to Arina, who seemed to have collected herself.
“Come, I’ll help you down.” The bruises started to show around the cut.

“Yeah, okay.” She stood, bracing herself against the cockpit wall, flinching to get rid of the pain. Slowly, girl.

But her limbs were okay and she only needed little help to get downstairs. The corridors were dimly lit by emergency lighting but the medbay was fully operational, running on a separate emergency power system. Not for infinite time of course but for the time being.

She sat down on a chair in a corner and waiteed for her turn, flinching while watching Temria. It looked really painful.

“Thank you for protecting me, Temria," she said quietly. "I’m sorry I brought you all in this situation, I should have been more cautious.” She knew that it was too late now but she still felt the need to say something while kneading her hands. She felt a bit cold.

To their credit, both Temria and Freh'ya understood the delicate handling the injury required, but it was inevitable that the commando would eventually twist something the wrong way just as assuredly as Temria would inevitably be unable to endure it all. For her part, the doctor did her best not to make a fuss about it, crying out only as long and as loudly as her pain, fear, and body demanded until she could wrest control from them.

With a grunt, she dropped down into the lower corridor, clenching her teeth and all but stomping off on her own as the reduced shock still ran up her forearm like hot blades digging into the bone. Hissing, she surveyed her surroundings, the corridor's contour immediately familiar to her from the time they'd spent aboard despite the darkness now.

"I want to check your head too." she called flatly back up to Arina, though she immediately kicked herself for sounding perhaps colder than she'd intended. She didn't intend to trouble the younger diplomat, in fact she knew on several levels she distinctly wanted not to, but Temria was not so old or wise yet that she could sound so poised under such duress. Frustrated with herself she proceeded to the medical bay.

The place was so clean it was almost disorienting. The internal gravity had indeed held fast and not a thing was out of place, the lights were on, albiet accompanied by small red ones to alert the occupant's to the host ship's distress.

Wasting no time, Temria approached the bio-bed, adjusting the opacity of the walls with a gestures to that she might see out but no one outside see in. Holding her hand over the small hololithic display suspended above the bed, she engaged the overlapping interface and grimly assessed the damage.

"All this fuss for a radial break..." she sighed, struggling to keep her arm steady as she slowly rotated it. The lateral forearm bone showed a clear break six centimeters below the elbow joint, while the remaining one showed a distinct fracture just along the middle, lending it a slightly unnatural curve.

Taking a heavy breath, she risked approaching the interface with both hands, if briefly, turning the scanner on herself completely for signs of any other trouble. As she had suspected she'd taken that blow to the chest about as well as she could have hoped for, having avoided a break aside from the one that was only just beginning to tempt her towards self-amputation...

With an exhausted smile and a soft sigh, Temria turned her attention back to the arm, testing the extent to which she could coax the unnatural twist out of it before she could fuse the damaged bone. It was a temporary solution, one that might eventually incur slightly improper healing, but she was more than willing to take the risk now and have to break it again to fix it properly, if that proved necessary.

Though given the ease at which she was able to turn it, she suspected, through teary eyes and clenched teeth, that it'd prove malleable enough to align properly after all.

After helping Arina down, Rahilan vanished into the darkened main deck, intent on performing a quick inventory and seeing how bad the damage was. She returned a short while later, as Temria was seeing to her arm, dragging a storage crate with her, and carrying several smaller ones on straps over her shoulders.

"Um... good news and bad news," she began tentatively. "That rock we hit - one of the rocks we hit - put debris through most of the starboard storage area, what was left after the engine blew. Personal storage is to port, so we've all got whatever we brought with us - Freh'ya, your equipment," she gestured to the crate. Her own hardsuit had looked intact as well, but she could go back for that - in the event that hostiles reached them before they were all ready, better of the two of them that Freh'ya was fully prepared. "We lost the other combat stores though, aside from the central armoury module, so, no extra armour." She looked guiltily at the diplomat and the doctor, feeling she was letting them down - she had thought about offering her own suit, but it would take too long to fit to a new body. Huntress doctrine was clear, in any case: given limited options, protect the non-combatants by fighting at peak efficiency, keep the danger from reaching them in the first place.

"We have spare kinetic barriers though," she went on, a little more brightly. "And enough weapons, as well as everyone's personal sidearms. Also I salvaged enough cold weather gear for two complete sets," she indicated another of the containers, "so that's a plus." Temria seemed to be handling her arm well enough that she'd be able to get into the top and jacket without causing herself too much distress. "There's sink clips to go around, and we've got enough emergency rations to last. Uh, Doctor, the fish didn't make it... sorry." She did her best to sound as if this was bad news, and turned to Freh'ya.

"How quick do you think we ought to move out?" she asked quietly. "The Remotes are built modular for repurposing if need be - I think I could work what's left of one of them into a gun drone. But it's not a simple task and I don't want to take up time we don't have."

“Can I help you with something?” Arina was asking Temria hesitantly. She could understand very well that Temria was pissed at her and the situation in general. Her headache had turned from a sharp pain to a throbbing which wasn’t exactly better.

In the current situation, the diplomat felt a bit useless. When Rahi brought all the equipment, she said: “I can walk and carry things.” At least she hoped that would be no burden. Looking down herself, she realized that she still wore her now blood stained and slightly damaged dress. She would have to change that.

But she let Arina have a look at her head first, when the doctor had finished the gut wrenching process with her arm. Arina felt a bit sick from watching that.

Meanwhile, Freh’ya was checking the airlock. It was intact but she had to open the inner door manually. It could stay open anyway because the atmosphere was breathable. The control panel could be rebooted and Freh’ya selected the environment controls. The readings for air pressure, temperature, composition and wind came up. Not exactly pleasant, shit-cold with heavy wind chill. Well, that was to be expected.

She looked through the small round window in the outer door. A glacier in a valley, lined with dark rocks. “Damnit…” .Then she called up the 3D map on the omnitool and tried to figure out where they were from what she had seen from above….

Rahi come down the corridor, carrying the packs and grates. Coats, pants, portable heating units….
“Good, I will need a sniper rifle with a good optic. Sidearms and those will be enough, we need no assault rifles. Drones would be great, can you operate sensor drones? I have checked my omnitool but the combat scan radius is no bigger than twenty meters or so, a drone at its periphery will at least double that.”

She looked at the hardsuits, then at the winter gear. Helmeted suits were heated as well but much heavier and more tiring when walking. We can decide on that when we leave, she thought.

A minute later she poked her head into the medbay to Temria and Arina. “How’s everyone doing? I want your opinion. Can you join me for the march to the mining facility or do you have to stay here? I’ll go alone if you can’t walk, Rahi will stay here with you then.” She looked at the pilot matter of factishly, since this wasn’t up for discussion, then back to Arina and Temria.
“But honestly, I don’t like splitting up.”

Temria worked with the meticulous eye for detail one would expect from a jewler, the pain proving quite the remarkable source of focus... When she was at last satisfied that she'd straightened the notable twist in her forearm as best as she'd be able to under such short notice, she kept it there on the surface of the bio-bed, using the interface with her other arm to surf through the sub-options in sub-dermal surgery...

Bracing herself, the doctor withdrew the micro-fabricator from it's place arranged amongst the other surgical tools and set it down on top of the break point. Inputting a choice second command into the console, the device issued a soft warning tone, and then lifted half an inch above her skin.

Temria exhaled sharply, readying herself for the worst, and when it came she didn't flinch. In but a few seconds the two pieces of bone were fit snugly against each other and held in place by a small mineral ring that would eventually break down as the bone healed. It didn't do anything for the pain... as she shook her head and took an uneasy breath, she noticed Arina had been speaking.

"Uh, no... wait, yes!" She turned to face the other asari, trying to smile reassuringly though the deep shade in her cheeks betrayed the pain she was in. "I could actually use your help preparing a brace but... let me take a look at you first... Do you feel any nausea, dizzyness? Tell me everything."