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Tika performed a small and stunted bow, then released his suit's tether and slipped down into the airlock.

(( Long post =/ ))

(( I knew I forgot something. ))

Tika could of course hear, as he'd heard the computer, too. His suit was conducting soundwaves through itself now that it was in a pressurised oxygen environment.

"I tend not to let little things like inferior AIs bother me, unless they start spitting drones at me, in which case I destroy them." He gave a small shrug.

"Suit, retract headpiece and provide me with gaps at my hips large enough to pull my weapons out swiftly." The suit responded quickly, simultaneously providing him with the requested holes, and pulling down the entirety of suit around his head, leaving it free.

"Aastaium..." He said. "Is like nowhere else. Very little in the way of surface structures, the sky is a much purer blue than anything you'll see most other places. Skies filled with all kinds of clean-propulsion vessels, stopping dead for flocking... gehraldula. A kind of bird species, I suppose. In some places, fields as far as the eye can see, or forests. I'll take you there some time. I'll take you all there."

Tika moved through the doorway and into the corridor beyond, as his mind drew back to his last visit to Aastaium, and the one small fact he'd gleaned from the doctor who had tried to pry information from him.

"Actually, Mark... I think that your people will soon be ready to leave of their own accord, if what I heard is true."

"Actually... I was told, by MI4, that there are rumours of an AI weapons program. And in truth I wouldn't it past them; those less able to keep their voice synthesisers offline have been known to suggest that sort of thing."

Tika continued to move along the corridor, stopping suddenly as the lights changed from reserve power dimness, to emergency red. The pulsing was soft and rhythmic, unaccompanied by any alarms.

"Looks like the ship's response systems are sluggish. Unless it has no alar--" That was when a shrill dual-tone began to pierce his eardrums.

"Oh, fun. Lovely. Really. That's all we need." Tika muttered as he spotted the b*****d drones. He was in front still, and so any weapons fire would hit him first.

"Suit, envelop me again." He commanded the suit, and it did so quickly and fluidly, the dull grey seeping over his head to form a shell, and then front turning translucent in the same configuration as before. The suit would be plenty enough to ward off these weapons, which, the suit told him, were only armour-piercing rounds, not enough to damage the Aastaian armour.

"Suit, form miniature point defence particle beam cannon, maximum... three terawatt output. Assign to right forearm" That would probably overkill, but what the hell.
The right forearm of Tika's suit blistered upward, beginning thinly at the elbow but becoming thicket toward the wrist; the workings of the requested weapon being formed in the available space.
Automatically, the suit provided him with a retinal-based aimpoint module and a finger-flex fire-mode.

Tika raised his arm to the drones, and focused on the one closest to the left of the corridor, from his perspective.

"Mark... ?" He enquired, presumably wondering if Mark would follow suit (pun not intended) and recover himself, then form a weapon.

(( Stop letting your real life mood affect your damn roleplaying. It's not very Literate of you at all. ))

Mark would find that the suits could withstand just about anything up to a one hundred megatonne nuclear blast, and that the sonic pulses would do little more than leaving a ringing noise reverbing around the suit, which the nanotech quickly worked to compensate for.

The bulets, likewise, simply stopped dead upon impacting the suits, or in some cases ricocheted away to bounce harmlessly against one wall before dropping to the floor.
Tika grinned, and opened fire.

He flexed his fingers closed, and the particle beam lashed out in a perfectly straight and solid beam of continuously output energy, ripping through the drone that Tika had been watching from the start.
He opened his fingers, locked vision onto the turrets, aimed his arm again, and closed his fingers again. The beam shot out once more, almost instantaneously connecting with the turret on the right, decimating it, and then moving sideways as Tika shifted his gaze slowly. The second turret followed it's sibling, and then the beam moved downwards, slicing into a second drone, moving onto a third, which escaped with only it's weapons hacked off, and then the fourth drone was torn asunder by the three terawatt beam of sustained particle energy.

Tika opened his fingers and the beam shut off, the bulge in his forearm splitting open in six parallel slits, venting heat.

"Halt intruder!" Said the drone, almost comically, as it began to lumber towards Tika.

Tika didn't know what it planned to do, tackle him, hit him, use some kind of contact stun weapon, but he slipped smoothly sideways all the same, simulataneously delivering a powerful downward blow into the top of the small machine, forcing it's legs to buckle underneath it.

"Ocarina." He said with a sudden gleam in his eye. "One to beam up. mechanical."

"Roger that and ten four good budy. Yeehaw!" Came the reply, as the drone faded from view.

"Oh hey, and ocarina?"

"Yeah?"

"NEVER. Speak like that again." Tika finished with a grin.

He turned to Mark. "Shall we proceed?"

"You kidding?" Tika asked, one eyebrow raised quizically.

"All you have to do is establish a thin foothold in the seam of the doors, and let the suit's strength do the rest."

He grinned, waving his right fore-arm around a little. "Or I could cut us a hole through."

Tika gently nudged Mark aside, applying only enough pressure to be taken as a hint, than to actually move Mark.

"I was figuring... Right after we get these crystals? No time like the present, and all that. Or, in this case, the very close future, since we're not leaving right now-- Know what? You get what I meant."

He grinned again, shrugged in a little 'whatever' gesture, and then brought the particle beam to bear on the elevator doors once Mark was out of the way.
He flexed his fingers, the beam once more ripping through the metal before it, highly energised particles causing the molecules in the doors to come apart as Tika quickly cut a large hole out of pretty much all of the doors. Much more than was needed for them to squeeze through. The red pulse of the emergency lighting even seemed to be present in the elevator shaft, as if someone was expected to be in there during such a situation.

"Remind me to fork out for repairs to this thing. We can get it done cheap in Aastaium. Hell, we get it done for free there. No currency."

Not wasting any more time on idle chitchat, he took a few steps forward, jumped through the hole, and disappeared.
Barely two seconds later a muffled thump arose from the hole, as Tika had latched onto the side of the shaft two levels down.