“Damn, girl, color me impressed,” Bulco said to Nori after they returned to the shuttle from their hunting trip. “That was one hell of a speech you gave them.”

After Nori’s flamboyant display, nearly every one of the guards had wanted to join the hunt. Nori had insisted on selecting two, aside from Diamond, who had prior combat experience and knew how to handle a gun.

The hunt had taken several hours as the Warped were hard to find, but they had eventually located and killed three using the modified ammo. The smaller caliber cartridges performed well, killing a couple of level two monsters with a few short bursts, but were less effective against the level four creature they encountered. Bulco’s Warped Buster came into play at that point and the first bullet took the monster’s head off, bursting it apart like a piñata.

Diamond absorbed the Tec from the higher level Warped and became a level three Diplomat. The two other guards both achieved level two. Noah, a sandy-haired young man with a positive personality, became a Gunner while Nicolas, a grim man in his thirties, took the Gunslinger Path.

Nori barely registered Bulco’s compliment, her hands were already a blur over her light console. “It was nothing. The important part is that the ammunition worked. The twenty-twos might not do a lot of damage, but with enough of them, at full automatic, we can mow down Warped like a bunch of chickens.”

Lana chuckled nervously. “I haven’t seen a Warped chicken yet and I really prefer not to. I’m sure seeing something so harmless transferred into a flesh-eating monster would haunt my dreams … more than they are now, I mean.”

“I think we’ve accomplished what we set out to do,” Nori continued. “And we’ve earned a bunch of piTec in the process. There’s no sense in delaying any longer, we should take the blueprints straight to the space station.”

“How are we looking on power?” Bulco asked.

“Fifty-five percent,” Nori said, looking concerned. “The last flight up there depleted twenty percent of the cells, and the damage we took to the thrusters causes us to spend faster than normal. After this visit, we’ll only have one more chance to go up there, assuming we don’t waste too much in the meantime.”
Bulco nodded. “No point in wasting any more power, let’s head up there.”

“On it.”

The monitors’ view of the ground zoomed out until the plane’s circumference was visible. As before, the inertial dampener prevented them from feeling the press of the rapid acceleration.

Several minutes later they broke away from Earth’s gravitational pull and soared weightlessly through space. Nori poured over the console, aligning the shuttle’s trajectory using the space station’s homing beacon.

Several minutes later, the bong-shaped station came into view. Now with experience to guide her, Nori confidently maneuvered the shuttle into the docking hangar.