BattleTech: Shrapnel, Issue #16: (The Official BattleTech Magazine) by Philip A. Lee

Author:Philip A. Lee
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2024-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

“Evans here. The forward compartment’s breached. Two confirmed dead, one is…mostly missing. Fair to say that one’s dead, too. One engineer is pinned and likely injured, but alive. Two engineers, presumably from the next compartment, are trying to free her. We’re assisting,” Charlie reported to Beauregard as he and the others quickly moved to help free the trapped woman.

“I’m losing air! I’m losing air!” She cried out repeatedly, flailing about in a panic as the others tried to free her. There was indeed air flowing from somewhere, made visible only by the red-tinted vapor escaping her suit with it, but none of them could see the source. It was concealed by the big chunk of dislodged hull armor pinning her against the wall.

“Evans, I’ve gone ahead and—” Beauregard began.

“Wait one,” Charlie interrupted.

“Hang on! We’ve got you! Stop flailing, or you’ll rip your suit even more!” Childers shouted at the panicking, trapped woman, grabbing her hands to steady her.

Looking over the shape of the panel, Charlie quickly did the math, then told everyone else where to grab onto the heavy panel before grabbing it himself. “All right! On three! One, two, three!”

All of them pulled in unison. The mass of jagged metal budged slightly, then stopped. Even with the reduced thrust gravity aboard the ship, it was heavy as hell.

“Again!” Charlie shouted. Everyone tried to better brace themselves for slightly increased leverage. “One! Two! Three!”

This time it shifted more, moving just enough for the engineer to slip out and collapse to the deck.

The large rip across the engineer’s thigh was immediately visible. A fair amount of blood was escaping with the pressurized air, lightly splattering over everyone else. She was doing the best she could to try to cover the tear in her suit and reduce the volume of escaping air to little avail.

“Hold it together so I can patch it!” Charlie opened a pouch on his belt and pulled out one of his two suit patches. Kneeling, he stripped off the adhesive backing and carefully applied the patch over the tear, quickly patting it down. He repeated the process with his second patch when the first didn’t cover the entire tear. Mercifully, that stopped the leak. He made a mental note to grab more suit patches from the supply cabinet as soon as he was done fixing whatever needed to be fixed.

Charlie made eye contact with the hyperventilating engineer while placing one hand atop hers and another on her shoulder. “Hey! Hey! You’re all right…” He read her nametag. “…Williams. Calm down. Slow breaths. You’re okay. You’ve still got…” He checked her forearm for her air supply readout. “…about twenty minutes’ worth of air left. You’ll be okay, so long as you don’t gulp it all down here and now.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. The room was illuminated with a strobe-like effect from a volley of missiles zipping by outside as he looked up to Schumacher standing over him. The tall Lyran spoke softly, “Evans, we don’t have time for this.

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