Chapter Text
The impact came before any of them could brace themselves, tossing up one side of the shuttle as though an angry god had flipped it, and then a sudden gut-rising swing of gravity pushing Titus’s heart toward his throat, and then an abrupt slam that cracked the body of the shuttle like a chemlight.
The lights guttered and died, and for a few seconds the shuttle’s bay was only illuminated by random showers of sparks from sundered wiring, before Titus’s companions activated the lights on their power armor.
“Status.”
“Functional,” Chairon’s voice over comm, grunting in time with the armor that pushed to rise from where it had fallen.
“As am I.” Gadriel, further back in the small personnel bay. “Nav status?”
“On it.” Titus pushed through the entry to the small control cabin. It was a small jumper craft, piloted remotely to save on weight, so the cabin was mostly redundant instrumentation, now reeking of burning wires and ozone. He did not have a techmarine’s skill, but he could activate the nav. It was as he’d thought: “Several miles off side of our objective.” A day’s walk, he calculated, if the path was smooth.
But this was Avarax, and their crash had not gone unnoticed, and they were Ultramarines.
It would not be smooth.
“Five minutes,” Titus said. “Gather supplies.” If they were going on foot, abandoning the craft, they would have to strip it of everything they could possibly need for the journey.
****
There are good ways to wake up (slightly to moderately hungover from engex) and bad ways to wake up (with a Galactic Council gun in your face) but Whirl thought he had just discovered a new secret third way to wake up: Interesting.
Because getting woken up by something slamming against the small hypershuttle so hard that the impact sent a crack skittering across the wall across from Whirl’s optic sure classified as interesting. The secondary explosions were also, well, raising ‘interesting’ into ‘picante’.
Whirl popped the charger out of his socket from the vertical recharge berth, and checked the charge on his main chest gun. Lookin’ good, especially considering he’d spent the last deca diverting its power to test his latest attempts to fix the pod’s engines.
It had been a pretty boring few decas, since crashing here, thrown out of the space bridge by frag knows what. Nothing worth killing had messed with him and he didn’t even have Verity to pester, since he was under orders (Ultra Magnus’s orders, and that mech had a way of making a mech’s life miserable) to keep Verity in hard stasis till they arrived back on Earth.
That’s a lot of words to say that this sudden interestingness was also very welcome.
And, Whirl thought, as he dug his clawed heels and elbows into the wall behind him, activating the magna clamps on his feet, maybe it would be interesting enough for him to get to shoot something.