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Your eyes close looking at the exposed wires on the ceiling of the vehicle. As time passes, your consciousness fades and you open them to the open to an array of unfamiliar colours. You focus to reveal a field of green, a similar colour to the algae farms within the hab block of the hive you were born in. The confusing sensation of a pleasant dampness on your feet makes you look down and see what seems like a black substrate. You walk forward, the soft green blades brushing up against your waist, a field which seems to reach into the horizon, illuminated by a sunset and only broken up by the ever-familiar skyscrapers.. but the rust and broken concrete replaced by dancing lights of more colours than you can describe and a pristine shell. On the distance, a particularly gigantic one reaches up beyond the sky, the grey hue replaced by a beautiful blue. It connects to a platform in the void, an arch that you cannot see the end or start of, joining two horizons together.
Your viewing is interrupted by the sound of screaming sirens all around you coming from the distance. You don’t take your eyes off the arch, the setting sun on the white metal making it look like a ring of embers. As your eyes examine it, a thick purple beam pierces the sky. You see debris spread out like an incendiary shell coming out of a cut barrel. As the arch is cut in twine, it starts getting closer to you, enveloped by a blanket of fire. The smell of ozone fills your nose.
You wake up to a ping informing you that you are less than a hundred meters away from the rendezvous point. Your head hurts. Your left hand instinctively reaches for your top right pocket for some IHO sticks and your lighter and get out of your bunk. You see your engineer sitting in hers next to you, the stable mutant normally towering over the rest of the squad. Her eyes, pupils like knife wounds and irises of red and orange, looks at you and then your IHO sticks. You sigh and reach your hand out. She smiles revealing sharp teeth, her scaled green hand reaches out and grabs a stick. You move to the front of the hovercraft and light one up for yourself.
The lights of the craft brighten up what seems like a series of thick pipes on the way down, you note that the circumference of the pit you originally entered had become much wider. Soon, you reach a spot which has some solid ground. As yours lands, the rest of the convoy follows. You take another note of your assets, two APC’s armed with heavy las-beamers, one with a heavy flamer, a hover tank with a railgun turret and an unarmed APC with an expanded cargo section.
